I take your point but actually, for me, at least in the initial stages, I'm just looking to recreate a feeling from my youth: tinkering with ideas and letting o

I take your point but actually, for me, at least in the initial stages, I'm just looking to recreate a feeling from my youth: tinkering with ideas and letting one discovery move me onto the next, figuring out how things work and seeing if I can improve on them. But I think you're right, up to a point, if there was an open source game or robot which was created using fairly low-level programming, so I could enjoy just tinkering with the code without having to learn lots of tools etc., it would be more inspirational than just trying to learn "for the sake of it" with a textbook, so thanks for your perspective.