It is clear to anyone that having a good basis on electronics, and especially on basic analogue circuits is crucial for understanding and designing complex things.
If I plan to make a simple logic circuit, I must consider using an MCU, because a bunch of logic gates (besides being hardly flexible and reusable) could be more expensive and use too much space, even for an hobbist. And if I have by hand an MCU I'm sure I have inside it as many logic gates as I need...
I envy those EE that in the early days of digital expansion could challenge themselves in putting logic gates, ALUs, sequencers and memories (each one in its different IC) on a board, and were asked to invent everything...and were payed a lot!
But I feel like nowadays creativity in hardware design has poor space (and would have even less in the future), since almost every system tends to be made on the same principle (ADC, controller, ...), or at least it seems stupid to use a different approach. So, perhaps the difference between a brilliant and a quite good designer becomes narrower.... And it makes me sad
I think it is better to start with something else, as many others said here above, but if you want to run before you can walk...
I found that using a USB PIC (in my case a 18F4550, but could certainly be 2550) with Microchip examples for firmware/software on PC is quite simple, requires little or no modifications to start. Surely, you need some programming skills (and very very limited hardware knowledge) to make something different than the examples, but of course there is the internet and the forums like this to find help.
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