I tried to start with KiCAD so many times and never could fully figure out how to do the basics of what I wanted to do. Mind you I was designing absolutely basic boards using capacitors, MOSFETs, resistors, some basic SMD sensors and ESP8266 modules. EasyEDA has a downloadable version that is significantly less clunky and the UI makes a lot of sense to an amateur. Plus of all the things I had tried it had me spend the least time finding footprints for components that were actually available and affordable. Nothing quite like picking out a capacitor just to find out that it costs $0.84/each while an equivalent but slightly different one would be $0.0037/each.
Oh, KiCAD's old UI was fucked. If you started on, like, KiCAD 4.0, then I can see why you bounced right off it. Today's UI is good, so I actually recommend starting on that over something like EasyEDA.
Footprints are a point in EasyEDA's favor, but in simple circuits, almost all footprints are universal. If you want a 10K+5% resistor, you just put in a 0402 (maybe larger if you're planning on hand soldering it) and pick the exact part afterwards.
