You could try out compact reactors which use all 6 sides but require more stabilizers for more compactness. I'm not sure if that will help your grouping issue.
It shouldn't be too hard for a new player. When I started playing power 1.0 confused me even though it was simply laying lines of spaghetti. After watching the in game tutorials my first reactor was efficient but very small. I then built a ship with it which also ended up being very small but ended up being Swiss cheese when I tried to fight a pirate station. After a couple months of struggling with the spaghetti reactors and trying to make a small yet powerful reactor I gave up for a while before I became interested in sm again. Then power 2.0 came out and I started building good ships. I'm guessing p2 is easy for me since it's more technical (and not completely math and spaghetti-related) and I understand physical connections and things like that better.
For new non-technical players it could be a bit difficult but there are a few good tutorials online which explain p2 pretty well (iirc there are two youtube videos about it made by
Gmodism). There's also the mini guide thing in build mode which helps with some of the basics. After all the game is far from complete so it will lack useful resources to make it more beginner friendly.
To answer your second question, it will be difficult but not as hard as the player's creativity limitations. Also you've been playing for eight months. You have to get used to the new system and change a lot of your play style (or whatever) while new players have to learn everything for the first time and not have to change much if anything at all.
