I want to master Wordpress as a CMS with various custom views,

Honestly, just get a template and you should be fine. Just don't pirate them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd0grLQ4voU

Here's a good tutorial but it comes with a watermark in the footer.php. Just remove the watermark in the php file and you should be fine.

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>>248783
I appreciate the advice and link. Your cool. Your the best.

>>248783
You're the dude who posted here a while ago asking how to remove that watermark.

>>248774
As for you OP, I would recommend looking into Wordpress Dev Kits which make building and setting up Wordpress much easier for custom work. A few that I use are:

Bones:
http://themble.com/bones/
A super rad kick off point that is super minimally and well tagged. Great start point.

Sage:
https://roots.io/sage/
Another great starter point that has a ton of useful tools already added.

I would also look into something called Timber which uses Twig for PHP dev. Helps a ton templating and what not.

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>>248823
Thank you very much for the response, I'll make sure to check out and play around with those tools.

Currently consuming this:
https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/getting-started/

And planning on quickly skimming through this:
https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/

just so I have some overview of how things fundamentally work in WP.