I agree that you want to attempt things that may fail to challenge yourself. But rewarding libraries (by using them) that make you feel like a noob is kind of

I agree that you want to attempt things that may fail to challenge yourself. But rewarding libraries (by using them) that make you feel like a noob is kind of rewarding an abusive behavior. Before you use something you probably should already have a good model of how it operates from a high level perspective, what you need to give them, why you are using them... The software should serve your need instead of forcing you to adapt conventions. If you invest time learning a bad software then the sunk cost fallacy will make you keep using the bad software and sunk-in more time. Exploring is hard, you should have a strategy for it, you should explore things in the right order so that exploring is easy, and you explore what you want. If your exploring strategy is to follow the steepest learning curve you will get lost in an infinite hellish mess like Sisyphus.