You’re going to get far more out of the tutorial from within Scrivener. It’s designed for you to alter the view of the contents as you go, so that you can get comfortable with the features available. You can always close it (the tutorial is just a Project), and when you open it again, you’ll be where you left off.
It’s also helpful to keep a few things in mind about Scrivener. First of all, it’s mostly intended as a first-draft tool. While you can set things up for the final output to look very nice, and even go straight to Kindle or other final output formats, if you need true styles or other layout features like text wrapping around images, you’ll have to do that when you’re done editing your words.
Secondly, Scrivener is not a Novelist’s writing program, so much as a writing program with tools that are useful to novelists, short-story anthology editors, PHD students writing their theses, technical writers, biographers, translators, TV Script writers, etc… In other words, it’s a toolkit, where a very few features will be useful to all writers using the software, and then a large number of optional features that you may find useful at various stages of your writing. Only a very small subset of features are written specifically with one kind of writing in mind, which is why you don’t have dedicated character tracking features, though you can employ various tools to keep up with them.
Finally, Scrivener isn’t for everybody. I’ve fiddled a little bit with Photoshop and similar image manipulation tools, and they are far too much for my meager needs. I’ve got a small collection of tools that allow me to do a few specific things with pictures, many of them with redundant features, because I wanted to just dive in an add text to my picture, not read a book on how to use the software first.
This is why the trial of Scrivener counts down from 30 days only when you are using it, and not from the first day that you started the software. You get a full month of interaction with Scrivener before you have to buy it, even if that month is stretched out over 30 weekly uses of it; at the end, you can export or compile your work and continue using that work in another piece of software if Scrivener isn’t to your liking. There’s an entire page devoted to the competition because Keith and the Lit & Lat team only want satisfied users for whom the software’s design resonates. That’s why you’ll find such enthusiasm for Scrivener here, and why you’ll sometimes encounter crankiness at overly harsh criticism of the software or the developers.