99.9% of people's "this stuff is hard" can be contributed to a bad course layout, a mismatch between the professor's teaching style and your learning style, a bad environment where you can't actually focus freely on the material, or one of a host of other problems that tend to plague CS education (IMHO).

I hear you about wanting to do a zillion things, and having to choose is difficult sometimes. But seconding what damned_colonial said, if you ever want to take some time and work on Dreamwidth, we'd love to have you! (And IMO Perl is a lot more forgiving than Java.)