feedback: first step failed

Question: How long should an avarage developer wait until Subversion is
mature enough to be usable?

The story:

I was lingering around Subversion for a long time. Today was the day!
Today I spent the whole sunday just to make the first steps towards
better config management and version control.
CMM-level 2!

I acknowledge. I have to. I feel ashamed: Now I'm back to earth. Cvs,
can you forgive me?
I've seen the truth: There is no silver bullet.
Forgive me as I tell you, I thought I'm a real software professional.
And: I didn't make it to bring up Subversion work for me.
What I wanted?:
Just build a repository as user "svn", check in a project as a different
"user",
and look if it's in there and that it has a revision assigned.

I'm pretty sure that the glory Subversion community will judge me as not
a fallow of them.
Please believe me: I've tried!

Developers and evangelists of Subversion: How do you test acceptance?
Or is it enough to you believing to have the best solution ever?

I couldn't follow even the first steps: Chapter "Quick Start" is a crap!
Ben, Brian and C. Michael, who told you to fill pages and pages with
nonsense words?

What I've tried?

On Linux as a user "svn" I created a repository.
As user "svn" I can run svnlook and get some meaningful answer.
As any other user I don't.
Spending hours and hours reading "Revision 10061" of the "Version
Control with Subversion"
I cannot find how to add a new user with access to the repository or
find some other philosphy of
access control.

What I found was: there are people out there who are very smart, much
smarter than I am.
They know their stuff. They can handle everthing, even Subversion.

I don't. Cvs has to be enough to me.

Rolf