Sorry, but you totally misunderstood me.

Pointers represents big problems for beginners, as they are stumbling stones. Conceptually, they are quite hard to grasp if you don't know the concepts of the underlying hardware.

But they are there for a reason, so we do want them. I have never once claimed that it is a problem that C have a very transparent pointer design - just that it is a strange concept to grasp for a beginner.

When starting from bottom up, with microcontroller hardware, registers and assembler, then it's natural that variables have an address. And then a pointer is just some form of index register - just as the index registers many early processors had before most mainstream designs started to make most (all) registers available for memory indexing.

But when starting directly with a HLL, it is not an easy step to take to realize that some variables stores the address of other variables and that you may have aliasing and multiple indirection.