Re your title: understatement of the year. For one it's not about being a noob, it's about being sane, or to quote
<mircea_popescu> dude i dunno about noobs. it'd be the bane of me.
Just a cursory glance through this forum subsection paints a gloomy picture indeed, nothing seems to work.
But the other end to consider is that most of Bitcoin is on-demand provisioning, and that demand may spike arbitrarily. It's not necessarily easy to predict nor is it always practical to follow the spikes (just consider that Bitcoin has a 400% limit on difficulty changes baked in by design, exactly because of this virtual world/real world velocity disparity).
In the realworld, yes the exchanges can crash, but that's incredibly rare
Actually no, it's not incredibly rare. NASDAQ blew up on Facebook IPO day, they're still arguing in court over it, dozens of cases. In fact the real world does a lot more poorly than we do, but it's not quite as visible because this real world is fat and so moves a lot more slowly than Bitcoin.