Hee hee, some may agree with you. jumped into Gentoo very early and hasn't stopped breaking things yet. Sometimes for fun, sometimes 'cause some distro maintainer type did something horrible ^.^
I definitely support "Just try things, see what breaks, then learn to fix it" as a learning method. Not necessarily for everycritter and not necessarily as a sole learning method but certainly it can be many fun and very productive, sometimes in ways that other methods would not be.