I've thought about it some and I'm pretty much just going to wait until Taylor has documented and finalized everything till I start large speculation on how people will be able to learn.. It could wind up being easier, could be harder. Might be something worth trying to measure in some way comparatively -- interesting little study.

Caveat: I am unfamiliar with the current state of L5 right now aside from overviews and conversations

IMO, many things you've expressed as being "forced" are not likely forced. I'm fairly certain the command bus won't be forced, just optional usage. Events have been in there since L3. DDD/Hexagonal aren't directly involved in framework stuff. I think things are optional now and some pieces are recommended, but really the way Taylor structures docs will define the "de facto" way of using Laravel.

As for the directory changes, I believe people (myself included for a while) were only assuming this would be harder for newcomers because it is a "standard". Realistically, these directory structures were largely inspired by DHH's decisions with Rails 10 years ago. People from other ecosystems based off Rails decisions will expect models/views/controllers as folders, but actual new developers won't know any different and it could wind up making a lot of sense to them. This is of course just my speculation, but I am interested in observing how people go about learning the framework and whether it appears they are learning it easier or finding it more challenging.

I'll say I think some newcomers to development will have issues with namespacing, as they do now, but that's just something that is going to come along with any modern PHP code these days.

I'm going to hold out on my actual expectations until I see what L5 is really going to ship with and to see what the documentation. Until then it's all just kind of up in the air and could be concern for nothing. We'll find out fairly soon :)

I too am waiting until the official release, with documentation - but hope it will be largely the same as L4, where you can jump in and create an MVC application using the basic building blocks, and later on get into more advanced features such as repositories etc as your skills develop.

As with L4, I'm sure the advanced features are awesome, save repetition, improve testability etc - but learning them takes time, which I generally don't have - and just need to get something up and running ASAP. Fingers crossed that's still possible with L5.

I've been putting off learning L5 because there are so many deign patterns I'm trying to catch up on first. Which is sort of similar why I was scared away from learning Rails. (I miss the 37 signals days ;( ) There were too many concepts to pick up on and too many "repos" that were supposed to work and dependencies that I could never really figure out.

L4 was awesome in the beginning but now in some ways it's becoming like rails.

I do realize that laravel is obviously infinite in usage but as I have continuously in the past have written, the documentation and "actual working demo app" just aren't there for beginners or "false-beginners" (those who have php experience).

This problem has gotten way better with better documentation and with the help of laracasts.

What I'm trying to get at here is that with more materials and more explanations that go beyond on "yes, we can do that" to actual examples and more verbose explanations the switch to L5 may not be as bad.