Lyra is definitely a steep, mostly undocumented (Epic! 
) learning curve.
The reward that you get for figuring it out is that Epic has already done SO MUCH boilerplate *** for you. Literally 10000s of lines of plugging engine things together is already done.
If you think it’s a pain to figure out how it works after it’s already done, imagine what a pain it will be for you to figure out how all of the pieces work and plug them together yourself. It will take you months of work, at least, depending on how good you already are with all of those engine components.
Better just to learn Lyra IMO if you’re at the learning stage like me. Once you get used to it, it’s not really that bad to use.
It’s true that Epic did way too much of Lyra in ***-binary uasset/blueprint form. It makes it much harder to develop real derivatives of Lyra without duplicating much of what they did.
On the plus side, it’s pretty easy to duplicate what they did and change it to work the way you want it to. Thus only Lyra C++ is reusable in any meaningful form, and all of the *** binary stuff they shipped should be considered example only, and you need to use your own versions of those assets.
Still, I reiterate that IMO it’s worth the time to learn Lyra. Even if you decide to ditch it in the future, you’ll have a much better understanding of the core engine pieces and how Epic put them together to make what they consider to be the next generation starter game template.
My $0.02.