On the “Gradle is scary for beginners” point.
Spring boot provide a utility where you give it some basic information and it produces a zip that is a starter project that you just open in any friendly IDE. Would that bridge the gap? It would of course be all code from there, no SDK utilities to help you design things, just you and a blue cube. Not sure what https://jmonkeyengine.org/ is written in, is it traditional html + js (and I’m seeing some md files) with no active server side?
I’d be up for creating something like that if people thought it was a good idea. (Although it would be easier if the site had a server side)
Although it would be interesting to know the experience of someone who was new to java and started with JME, I can’t really imagine that myself, 3d game programming is HARD. JME does a good job of making it “as easy as possible” but “as easy as possible” is still hard. I went console apps → 2D toy games → android apps → 3D games (intermingled with things people would actually pay me for), which felt like a natural progression of difficulty