>>7
>The vocabulary is the biggest hurdle as there is no good way to significantly reduce it compared to natural language, so you'll still spend hundreds of hours studying until you're truly fluent.
Wut. Just learn the affixes, that reduces the vocab by alot. Most people just end up gluing roots and affixes together instead of learning a bunch of unnecessary words. There are alot of roots you'll see in word lists, but that appear rarely in conversation because people don't really need them, due to the affixes. You can tell when you're reading something written by somebody who learned Eo vocab from a dictionary rather than from speaking with people, because they usually use too many obscure individual words that a well-known root plus some affixes could have created just as well.
>>10
Esperanto lit and poetry suffers from a bunch of amateurs trying to write, not so much from the language itself. As a /lit/fag, I will say that there does exist some esperanto poetry that is good, particularly when the author/poet acknowledges the language's origins rather than trying to pretend it is a natlang. The quality of the writing depends mainly on the skill of the writer, not on the language it's in.
>there is a rumor that orwell's "newspeak" from "1984" was inspired by esperanto
A rumor? I thought it was a fact...
As for OP: It's worth it if it sounds fun to you. It doesn't have much of a practical application beyond Pasporta Servo. I've never used Pasporta Servo but I've never regretted learning Esperanto and continuing to use it with people, but that's because I'm the kind of person who studies useless stuff for fun.