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We'll have to agree to disagree on this one I guess. Of course Liferay is going to say the documentation could be better -- what counter argument do they have?!

Documentation for just about every piece of software I have every worked with (sold by a vendor) is lacking. I think you missed my point -- it's not about abandoning developers at all. Would you rather have several thousand pages of documentation telling you how to structure a project by hand? or a tool like Blade, or Liferay IDE that does it for you? To me that is an example of how they are making decisions that HELP developers with their every day work.

I would also argue that your point about having a DXP license is irrelevant. The license for DXP is your typical Open-Source-Enterprise. You are paying for patches/security fixes/support. You also may not be aware but unlike the big competitors, IBM, Oracle, etc, Liferay licensing doesn't cost millions to get up and running with complex formulas about how many clock cycles and which OS you are using blah blah blah. In fact, in terms of enterprise licensing I'd say it is cheap, dirt cheap, for what you get.

I'm not arguing the lack of documentation. I'm arguing your statement that somehow that means Liferay doesn't care about the people that use it.
Your version of proper documentation, I have rarely found useful anyway. There are plenty of products out there with stupid shit like --

long productId
A numeric identifier that uniquely identifies a product

I don't need someone to write that down for me. That kind of obvious documentation isn't worth the electricity used to render it on my screen. Most of the time, if I want something "documented" its a problem that is difficult for me to solve -- probably unique to my client, or too complex to write in a one page tutorial. I spend 90% of my day reading and writing code. When I need an answer, I open the source code and look (by the way, this is something that Liferay does that not many vendors do. Oracle has never shared with me their source code for ANY product I've licensed from them).

I am guessing that you are new to the product so you have not yet picked up the naming conventions, the design patterns etc that the portal uses. I was once new to the product as well, and believe me, I remember how frustrating it was as well. I am sympathetic to your situtation which is why I try to help on the forums as much as I can, often trying to provide an explanation not just an answer. In fact a lot of us long time Liferay developers have had to near start over again when 7 was introduced with the new architecture. You think you have it rough now? you should have tried this 2 years ago! Not only was their little documentation, what was out there was inaccurate or out of date!

There is certainly a time investment required to obtain a critical mass of knowledge in the product to be good with it. I think the most common back end stuff is documented pretty well on the developers portal -- the front end stuff? yeah lacking. But most front end people want to use their own stuff anyway and don't care how Liferay does it. Very few people have come to me and said "Can you teach me how to us AUI?" .. it's more like "How can I use Angular instead of AUI".

Final note. The community for Liferay is really supportive so what it lacks in terms of documentation you will find can be made up for with the community. My advice would be to use the slack channel and this forum (as you have been) to compensate for the gaps -- but dig into the source. I am always surprised by the number of developers I work with who don't even bother to download it. The source has all your answers. That's why they say "To find the truth, you need to go to the source."