It's not so much that you make the device do what you want, but you learn what the device can do.
When I got my first cyclometer/GPS device back 12 or so years ago, much of the issues that burnt me to a crisp and had me ranting were my own misunderstanding of what a feature was actually supposed to do.
The Edge 500 pretty much always worked perfectly as it was supposed to. I was the one just not working right.