> Even doing basic things [...] requires lots of StackOverflow digging
It's mostly a matter of getting used to it. If you do it by hand, you tend to better understand the building blocks and it gets easier to compose them into whatever you want. Same as any language or framework, really
> Should I give up and just buy templates?
Give up, no. Buy templates, why not. They're usually fairly cheap and if it saves you hours of coding, that's fair enough (I'm food with frontend and I buy templates sometimes). But if it's a skill you need, it's probably a better investment to hone it than to work around it
this one
> Even doing basic things [...] requires lots of StackOverflow digging
It's mostly a matter of getting used to it. If you do it by hand, you tend to better understand the building blocks and it gets easier to compose them into whatever you want. Same as any language or framework, really
> Should I give up and just buy templates?
Give up, no. Buy templates, why not. They're usually fairly cheap and if it saves you hours of coding, that's fair enough (I'm food with frontend and I buy templates sometimes). But if it's a skill you need, it's probably a better investment to hone it than to work around it