I’m new to materials in general, and I find it incredibly difficult to navigate through the sea of nodes, and I do not believe nodes are a very good design choice for making materials. I know what I want to implement, but I don’t know how to in spite of how simple it is, even after browsing through …

You can type shader code directly into a custom node, if you want… Custom Expressions Expressions that allow the use of custom, plain shader code. Also [Unreal Engine : Tron Material]