I initially played through the tutorial levels (that you can get for free) before buying the full game, and I think that helped a lot; it's a very keyboard-centric interface that takes awhile to get used to and isn't likely to appeal to everyone. But the tutorials are pretty good.
Also, a lot of the stuff that's kind of tedious and awkward, like laying out complex belt systems, gets a lot easier when you get construction bots and can start building from blueprints. It's like a different game from that point.
A theme of the game seems to be to make the player do things that are hard or laborious but which can be accomplished in an easier way by using the the tools at hand more effectively, or eventually the problems can be worked around with new technology. It's not quite like a puzzle game where you have to solve each problem in front of you correctly before you can advance; rather you can keep advancing until the point where you're overwhelmed by technical debt (e.g. you end up spending most of your time running around fixing train deadlocks).
Not everything that's awkward or hard is a deliberate game mechanic, though. In the 1.1 release they've said they're planning to change some things that have been pain points for users.
I would say the game is very much like a CLI - you might at first recoil at the visual style, but almost immediately you understand why - there's going to be a LOT of stuff on the screen, and your little simple man and his simple stuff leads to a simple way of assaying what is happening where.
I would say to enjoy the game you really have to play it to the point where you build robots. Factorio is a game that is amazing for many reasons, but to me the main one is exponential growth.
At a certain inflection point you can basically tear down everything you've ever built by hand, and have robots recreate it all in a minute or two.
The combination of blueprints and robots turn the game from some tedium to a game purely of mind and very little tedium.
I forgot that. Yes, I really hated it when I first played it. I got attacked and couldn't select things quickly and I died and couldn't get to my stuff anymore. I almost gave up.
It turns out the UI is fairly configurable and after I made it so right click cancels I sort of adapted.
But yes, when I first played it the UI was horrible. It needs some sane defaults like more common RTS games.
