Man maybe I should have started with unity but I’m such a fucking hipster I just never go with the popular thing. Ultimately happy I don’t have to worry about the licensing BS and I still get to claim hipsterdom, but it’s clashing with my desire to work in ways that make sense to my poo brain.
I appreciate your response! This is basically how I have managed to finish small games in the past. Only issue is much of my intention on finishing those small projects was to find the 'right' way forward, when that clearly isn't an effective way of thinking about it.
I think my best bet is to apply the same mentality you're describing to larger projects, like you're saying. As long as I don't get too sloppy, refactoring will be a necessary effort when I actually hit issues that stall my progress.
I feel your frustration about spending years trying to understand the right way to use an arcane system. I don't know if this is the kind of response you were hoping for, but I urge you to just pick one method and try to develop past it, see how far you can get, see if it holds you back, if you needed to generalize better. Just brute force a couple approaches at random until you find one that lets you get shit done, so you can get to a working demo that has 1 semi-complete level/stage, no matter how hacky. Working on other things besides the difficult abstract one might lead you to useful answers or better ways of (re-)implementing features, and nothing will motivate you to find a system that works more than having a working demo that you know proves your concept, but also knowing the code is shit and ripe for refactoring.