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The main problem is often time. When you have a full-time job already it's difficult to put in extra effort to learn a completely different topic.
I remember in 1991 I had my amiga I wanted to do something with it beside games. Someone gave me a copy of some Micro application asm book, and I bought Action Replay MKIII (excellent investment) to crack games (I already knew 6502 asm & C)
I also got hold of the amiga bible (translated in french, that helped at the time), comprehensive book about custom chips & CIAs
I was young, no children, a lot of time on my hands. Certainly helped.
That said, I never got into proper game coding. I "just" coded an emulator then JST & all the hd game stuff.
It's difficult to want to embrace all the goals at the same time though: a game is complex: there are graphics, level design, sound, file I/O, controls, tasks, interactions with the OS... you can't learn all that in one day. One step at a time as Dan said.
And even mcgeezer admitted that he shouldn't have written Rygar in asm. Better do a mix of C & asm. C does the tedious loading/organizing/hiscore/computation parts that don't require too much speed. asm does the "fast" parts.
note that a lot of games are coded in C only. They're not the fastest, but still... (Marble Madness, Cinemaware games, Lucas Arts, Sierra)
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