Seriously. I visited NYC last year and spent a few days hanging out with some friends out on Long Island. Traveling on LIRR is a very unfriendly process for anyone who doesn't do it basically every weekday and integrating LIRR travel with subway travel can be a non-trivial optimization problem. It's not super complicated once you get the hang of it, but otherwise it is just not obvious where you can get on and off trains, where the trains go and when, etc.