Honestly, I don't think Guilty Gear is difficult at a low level, it's just that many beginners want to jump right in and do the flashy stuff they should be learning at an intermediate level.
I'll use Chipp as an example since I'm most familiar with him. If someone new to GG wanted to pick him up, I'd tell them to start by simply learning what can chain into 2D(crouching Dust). This will give a new Chipp player hard knockdown, which starts the real magic of the character, his insane mixup game, start teleporting, or jumping or whatever, catch them trying to mash DP by crossing up and messing up their input or take advantage of them respecting you too much. Getting hard knockdown is so useful in GG that learning the quickest way to do so is priority number 1 when starting out, and these tend to be pretty simple and will be useful forever.
All the system mechanics should be taken a little more slowly, it takes time to learn these things, and no one expects you to have it down in one day. It's easy to get overwhelmed but if you keep it simple and start by focusing on just learning the basics of your character, it's not that bad.
