Just wait till you start flying aircraft with fuel-injected engines: It is some kind of a black art: many have tried, few have mastered. Sometimes it just seems that moving the throttle/mixture in some random order works best
Now that is funny... I train largely on fuel-injected engines (C172R/S w/ IO-360), and have never had any problem at all starting them... See lots of people crank them 'til they're blue tho'.
One thing could be when priming by the book; fuel pump on, then move mixture towards full rich until you get an indication on the fuel "flow" (=pressure) gauge, then mixture cut-off and fuel pump off. The amount of priming you get that way will depend on how fast you move the mixture. Mixture full rich, fuel pump on, indication on fuel flow gauge, wait one second, fuel pump off, mixture cut off; seems to work better and more consistently. No priming when hot; the worst that can happen if you underprime is that it won't fire at all, so then you just stop what you're doing, prime, and crank again, it will fire.