I am so surprised when I look into the substrate-relevant project code. It's so hard to understand, runtime macros everywhere.
Now, It's easier for you to develop your own blockchain base on the Substrate framework. The most difficult section might be how to make rustc accept your code.
It is not necessary to use the macros to develop on Substrate. As you may know, the macros ultimately expand to be real rust code, so if you understand the inner working of Substrate at that level, then of course you can write that code yourself, but this will certainly not be as easy as using the macros.
I believe the macros expand to about 3x the lines of code as you write, and contains logic that we try to keep opaque from the average runtime developer.
It is a fair criticism that the runtime macros can be hard to debug or work with, but we are looking to solve this issue by using Rust attribute macros and staying closer to traditional Rust syntax.
See the tracking issue here: https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/issues/5678
