Do whatever you want, I'm just commenting what I think is wrong.
I also don't think there is such thing as an inherent skillset, you can learn anything if you want to, given a certain amount of base intelligence, which I assume exists in most people here.
The biggest time waster is probably, if you don't have a professional to tell you how things are done correctly, since then you spend much time doing the wrong things until you find the right way, while it would be much easier to do things right from the start.
@ Jason Campbell
For example I used your shotgun model in Uebergame, since I wanted to save me time: https://opengameart.org/content/semi-au ... h-magazine
Later I figured out that the textures were all broken so I removed them and use plain colors and the mesh was not the best as well, that was in 2016 and now I see that you still do textures wrong. I could give you people countless other examples, where I thought I was clever to use some stuff someone already made, but in the end it turned out that it was broken in some way and I had to fix it leaving me with a not so optimal solution and not having saved me much time.
It is not that your tutorial here in general is bad, indeed it is pretty good and helpful, but it really annoys me if I see bad practices and things that are not thought through over and over again.