I understand, but from a college room in 6 months, you can learn all the basic electronics and complex schematics. 2 weeks would be enough to study all of the components; there are not many. Starting with Ohm's law and logic after that would be sufficient. People are confused because of the tiny boards made by cutting-edge companies that look like magic.

Breadboard kits are $30~. I designed many ESP boards; it is well documented, and if I mess up something, asking Claude or ChatGPT helps because the documentation is very thorough

It boils down to chips and MOSFETs at the end. Swapping a chip on a premade design with your own idea, especially in the ESP era, is not that difficult, with AI and software testing before sending it to PCBWay.

An ESP32 can nearly meet all the computational needs of a small project, such as a keyboard. You can come up with your own version in a few days, literally. WiFi, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), RAM, disk space- all in one chip. The rest is Python (yes, Python if you don't want to learn anything else). You can build a custom board with what you need; there are countless ESP projects out there that come with board design already. Once you feel comfortable, you can switch to a more specialized chip for a specific purpose.

KiCAD is pretty good.