I have to agree with you on that. He tends to take the long way to get anywhere. When demonstrating something he’d often select several items to use as an example when one would work just fine and be quicker. Still watching 2 hours of video made the manual much more useful.
The problem with the manual is that it doesn’t provide any overview to create context. It pretty much heads straight into every detail from the first page. This is great for reference, but not so good for establishing an initial understanding of what’s going on - what is crucial to understand and what isn’t. Compare the Halion manual with the Scores portion of the Cubase manual - another complex and not always intuitive topic. The Scores documentation starts off with a good overview that supplies context for all the details that come in later chapters. Having that context makes it easier to read the remaining manual and focus on what is important to you now and skip over (for the time being anyway) what isn’t. The way the Halion manual is structured you can’t really do that - you just get thrown into the deep end of the pool and hope you can teach yourself how to swim before drowning. Documentation that must be read slowly and carefully is not well constructed (I say this as someone who in a previous life hired tech writers to produce documentation).
The BFD3 videos are done by a guy named Eli Krantzberg who does a lot of the Groove 3 videos. He is much better than Mark - quick pacing, clear explinations and through. Looking forward to some of the other topics he’s covered.