I certainly feel that the Arduino got too heavy an attack here, who says one has to start from the lowest point in EVERYTHING? Coming from the software world it would be impossible to think that you are going to program everything from scratch from the ground up, I.E. let's say you write a piece of business software for Windows, hell because you are on Windows that is already forcing you to use Microsoft code already! As things inherently become more complex the building blocks become more encapsulated, I.E. 20 years ago if you where going to write a game for the computer you would be doing it yourself from scratch, today you pick the engine you want to use as a base, use your favourite 3D modelling program, then fire up your skills on some scripting language like LUA to make the magic, very little real code is ever written, often what is written is the menu and UI structure on top of the 3D engine.
It was the Arduino that got me into electronics because as a programmer by profession the idea of something I could program is what appealed to me, the basic concepts of electronics followed as I experimented. Sure you can work an RGB LED with a 555, but I see no point in that when I can use a simple AVR to do it and program it however I like (Though I still recommend one learns how a 555 works anyway).
One thing I DONT like about a lot of the AVR community is how they like to just buy brand new Arduinos and use them permanently in a project, a 328p cost about $1.50 to $2 individually and only need a minimal amount of parts to get them running.
Now to the OP: My recommendation is get an Arduino UNO, then to go and get some actual AVR chips, my recommendation are the ATTINY85, ATTINY2313, ATMEGA328P, ATMEGA1284P, some 16MHz crystals to run those chips, 22pf caps for the crystals, , along with that get yourself a resistor kit, electrolytic cap kit, ceramic cap kit, some random but useful things like 555 chips, 595 and 165 shift registers, some diodes, transistors, push buttons, and really you will have everything you need to do just about anything. Quite literally how I started! I went to Radio Shack and bought a resistor kit with 500 resistors, similar cap kits, transistor kits, etc and just started learning them all, I read through about 3 separate electronics books (2 of them had nothing to do with MCU's at all) and did all of it sequentially through the book to learn all of the basic concepts and just branched off from there.