Or should I just start hacking patches and learn on the job as more senior pmdevs slap me around for stuff that doesn't make sense?

Well I'd hope that nobody would slap you around. But yeah, I'd say start hacking patches. For instance wrapcode isn't too difficult to deal with as a black box (yeah, says me ;-)

Too be honest tho its really really hard for me to know what to say about the learning curve, and protocols here. For instance from my point of view, there aren't really any protocols here. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't, just that its hard for me to tell what they are. I guess im too close to the trees. Likewise I'm not sure what there is to be intimidated by. The code can be a little convoluted, and sure there is a fair amount of background knowledge to aquire, but ultimately its not that complex. Most htmlcode nodes are just like subroutines and can be treated as such, ie a black box with expected inputs and outputs.

Anyway, when i started pmdev'ing my strategy was generally to find something I didn't like, or that I thought could be different/better, and figure out how to make it happen. So when I hear people asking questions like yours I don't know what to answer as I never really felt the need to ask those questions.

The point of all these comments is that you aren't the first to ask questions like these, and I still dont know what to answer. I'd really like to be able to, but I'm not like some of the other monks on this site who can really explain something properly. I created the how-to wiki to try to provide somewhere that this stuff could accumulate, but I dont know what to put in it or where to go with it. I need help.

So frankly if you are a pmdevil and you aren't contributing because of the learning curve then please help me understand what you feel unsure about, preferably via the how-to wiki, and then we can address that need. I really dont know what kind of things are holding people back. If I knew what they were then id do my best to address them.