The main thing I got out of teaching myself how to do it from scratch is the discovery that there's possibly nothing more frustrating and less satisfying than spending days and weeks designing and building relatively simple electronics projects from scratch and then discovering all the fascinatingly inscrutable ways your designs can completely fail to work.
This isn't to say that there aren't people who love it. But I'd guess that for every one person who does there are 100 people where immediately diving in at such a low level kills all the joy. Maybe compare it to trying to get a 10-year-old into games development by starting them off on z80 assembly language.
Tangentially, my time learning electronics straddled the demise of Radio Shack, and I think that might be part of what made it less fun than I expected. With Radio Shack, if I realized I needed a component I had a decent chance of being able to acquire it that day, probably for less than $1. Now that sourcing components almost always has to be done by mail order, realizing you're out of that one size capacitor stalls your project for a week or two and might involve being willing to pay $10 shipping and handling for a $0.15 part.
I feel the opposite! I can usually get components next-day on Amazon, and I can get entire circuit boards _assembled_ from China in about a week. Maybe I'm not trying to do anything particularly hard, but I keep being pleasantly surprised when things work on the first or second try
This isn't to say that there aren't people who love it. But I'd guess that for every one person who does there are 100 people where immediately diving in at such a low level kills all the joy. Maybe compare it to trying to get a 10-year-old into games development by starting them off on z80 assembly language.
Tangentially, my time learning electronics straddled the demise of Radio Shack, and I think that might be part of what made it less fun than I expected. With Radio Shack, if I realized I needed a component I had a decent chance of being able to acquire it that day, probably for less than $1. Now that sourcing components almost always has to be done by mail order, realizing you're out of that one size capacitor stalls your project for a week or two and might involve being willing to pay $10 shipping and handling for a $0.15 part.