Funny story time ... my problem with learning to sharpen with whetstones was due to taking my knives to a local sharpener.
I could sharpen two of my knives with a whetstone just fine but could never figure out why. But they were my two smallest knives, so I assumed that it was skill issue when I was handling the bigger knives.
It turns out the local sharpener that I used ground an absolutely absurd angle into the cutting edge on my big kitchen knives--something like 30+ degrees. Given that they did cut for a while, I presume that they also had something like a "microbevel" on them. Of course, the problem is that I am never going to be able to put a "microbevel" back on them with a whetstone.
However, an amateur with a whetstone like me is going to have difficulty figuring all this out because they are always going to suspect their own skill.
Of course, as soon as I put them on the fixed angle sharpener, the fact that the edges had an absurd angle was immediately obvious. And the fact that, yes, it is going to take a while to correct this also became obvious. So, I sat down and stoned the edge with a 100 grit(!) diamond stone for 45 minutes until I got the angle back to something reasonable. And then went up the grits to sharpen it.
Just for giggles, on my last kitchen knife, I used the system to fix the angle, and then I used whetstones. Funnily enough, it sharpened just fine. I'll still use the fixed angle system in the future though.