Hi man,
I completely understand your feelings.
i agree with all you said.
I dont think that studying all the function will give you better things, there is really too much stuff in unreal to know it all.
In 3 years i never touched the particles emitter for example, but thats ok for me.
Unreal is a work in progress too, and things change quite fast and a lot of bugs keep us awake throught the night
So my personal approach is
have a big dream. break it down in smaller pieces and learn to do them
Plus … there are more ways to do every task, and there is not always the perfect node to do what you need.
For example there is a node to get the rotation from a point to another , called FindLookatRotation
But you can also use some vectors to make the calculation yourself, and pretty often i use this way.
All this pieces are tools, you can use them in a lot of ways
this lead to the FishProblem,
people make tutorial like, How use a hammer to hammer a nail.
The documentation sas: A hammer can be used to hammer
Discover that you can use the hammer to paint (even if badly) is… a way to use it .
We cant have 100 tutorial on every use possible of every class.
But i am perfectly with you that the documentation could say something more useful than that .
For me the important parts are:
How make a standalone or a android apk. (and differences between them)
How manage actors, talk between them, get references…
Savegames, and structures
Multiplayer on same machine.
Multiplayer on server ( here i am lost )