Your not kidding huh? Even when I have problems I try to figure it out, as for the prompt sometimes it's to small on my tv I am not crazy when I say this right it's only on my 360 not all of them but some , and some instruction manuals do not even go into detail that much anymore just the bare bones basic so I never concentrate on them in fact when I was younger sometimes still today I still lose the manual
, but I still get business done like a champion 
I think some of the problem is if they make the gameplay too "deep", ore better worded, gameplay more convoluted than it HAS to be. It's kinda like story. Some people think, if you just add mature situations and dump in a mess load of philosophical shit, that automatically equals a mature, adult story. It's all about execution. It always has been and always will be. You can make a really effective story out of a really simple idea. Applying that to gamesplay, sometimes song developers think it makes the game more hardcore to throw on all this uneeded crap, just for the sake of it. And everything you need to know would just add up to the point that memorizing ever single little detail would result in a manual as thick as a dictionary. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point.
But I do agree, add THAT(what I mentioned above) with kids who just can't find the time to do simple things, like read more basic of tutorials, and lack any ounce of resoucefulness required to be a human being. Not a healthy mix for a gamer in this day and age.
I always wondered, for the longest time, why others weren't as self-resourceful as myself(and given the posts on this thread, others here like myself). This is not related to games only, either. For as long as I can remember, anything that interested me lead me to new paths of exploration. Example, If I liked a certain movie, research movies like it or similar style, check 'em out to see what new "treasures" I can find. This has become something MORE convenient with internet. Say I like gory zombie movies, I can just search around for lists of gory zombie flicks, and see go searching for them. I can ask other people to recommend things to me, and by taking their recommendations into account, experience NEW things. Same with music. High school was great. I turned so many of my friends on to things they wouldn't never heard otherwise, and they turned me on to new things as well. My taste span genres and decades. I don't limit myself to the here and now. I don't wait around for trend to tell me what to like, I search it out for myself. That's why, for the longest time I could never wrap my head around how anybody could not want that for themselves or lack that enthusiasm.