arachnaut
sharke
...
The manuals are so bad I would consider it grounds for a refund. Take Molekular, the "revolutionary" new modular effect unit they rave so much about. It has a lot of wacky effect modules that you'll probably never, ever want to use in a track because they just don't seem to produce anything approaching a musical sound. So why would you ever want to chain 4 of them together, cross modulating everything in their path? Let's say you want to learn about the "Plagiarism" effect. Here's NI's explanation in the manual:
"The input signal’s amplitude is measured using an envelope follower. The measured RMS data
is used to trigger 16 envelopes, which in turn are used to play back 16 “voices.” The voices
are commonly switched between bandpass, sine-wave, or pulse-wave modes. The pitch or center
frequency of each voice is generated from a base pitch plus per-voice offset that is read
from a look-up table with various interval sequences. For example, the 16 voices can be configured
to play the base pitch and its first 15 harmonics as sine waves. In pulse-wave mode,
the envelope is additionally used to modulate pulse width."
Totally understandable right? You totally know where you are from that. 
But this is how all of their manuals are written. ...
Molekular is not a very good example and it is not a typical manual from NI by any means.
It was based on a Kore series of software called Deep Freq and Deep Transformations by Denis Gökdag from SSFX (now with Zynaptiq).
In that original manual Denis describes 3 presets in great detail and then concludes that to describe them all would take a 150 page manual that would leave the reader brain-dead.
The presets that came with Molekular are not very good in my opinion. Simon Stockhausen has a much better set on his patchpool web site.
I made a few presets for the user library and, having spent a few weeks, decided that it was way too much work - I would just make a preset whenever I thought I needed one. Getting a bunch of stuff to morph properly is very difficult, far more difficult in Molekular than Skanner (which also has dynamic morphing). But just making a single preset is much easier.
No matter what instrument or effect I buy, I usually am lucky to find 5 or 10 useful presets that fit my taste. The rest are just starting points for my own preset.
To get back to Molekular. I've found that knowing how some effect, like Plagiarism, is designed, MIGHT help you use it. But in my experience, nothing beats twiddling the knobs, fooling around, and discovering for oneself how to make it work for them.
Here is one of Denis' patch description for a Plagiarism patch. I put in only the image, not the text description as an example.
Later in the manual there is a description of the design of Plagiarism that is over 5 pages long. I looked at it once - I'd never read it.
Also, in my opinion, you tend to get the best advice by asking questions on the Reaktor (or other NI) User Forum. From the various types of questions we see there it appears that very few ever crack open a manual.
I don't dispute that fooling around with the knobs is the best way to feel something out, however if I have just a basic understanding of the idea of a synth or effect then I find that my knob twiddlings are far more constructive. The Molekular manual is terrible at explaining what the basic idea of the effects do. I get that it's technical, but some people are clearly better than others at explaining technical things in easy to understand terms. It's not just Molekular, I found the Spark and Prism manuals pretty baffling as well. I do find it interesting that there have never been Groove3 courses on either of those synths despite them being flagship NI products, and I'm convinced it's because nobody else can make enough sense of the manual to make a video on it.
One other issue I have with products like Molekular, and indeed other NI synths and effects, is that there seem to me to be way too many places to adjust things like mix and modulation levels. For example with Molekular, you have master mix, fx and dry controls. Then each effect has not only a mix control but also a separate wet level as well as the output level. Is it really necessary to have that extra wet level control? Surely you can achieve what you want with nothing more than a mix control and an output control. Same with the master controls - why have separate dry and FX knobs when you could just have a one master mix knob leading to master output? I get that they're trying to give the user the maximum level of control possible, but sometimes that's just too much control. It makes gain staging and dry/wet adjusting a never ending chore.
Incidentally, I don't know if you've ever experienced a problem with Molekular not saving modulation assignments properly with a project? I have an instance of it that's just basically an LFO assigned to a filter cutoff in mono. However, whenever I load the project, that modulation signal has been switched to stereo despite the little stereo icon not being lit under the cutoff's modulation slider. I have to unassign the modulation and reassign it every time I load the project.