I guess if one's hobby is fiddling with emacs, then I could see why learning edebug and the profiler are valuable first steps. But I view emacs as merely a tool to get vastly more important work done. I just want it to stay out of my way.

I have been using emacs for 20 years and never heard of edebug before today, and have never used the profiler. If I install some new package and it doesn't immediately work, I usually uninstall it right away. I don't have time to fuck around. I would rather chew glass than debug breaking changes in my init.el so I make changes rarely, and deliberately. To each their own, I suppose.