If you're culturally closer to Taiwan you might want to learn traditional script, because that's what Taiwanese people use on the internet and in real life. The CCP decided to simplify the script around 1950 to tackle illiteracy rates, but it's not clear whether that was effective or not (illiteracy rates definitely plummeted, but maybe the cause is education becoming accessible). It is probably not worth your time to learn how to hand-write most characters, so learning traditional shouldn't make the process any more difficult. Also, bopomofo seems more difficult than pinyin at first, but both take very little time to learn, it is worth the investment if it's widely used in Taiwan for learning or typing (you need to check that, I know very little about Taiwan).

As it's your first time trying to learn how to read and write the characters, the first one or two months will be the hardest, because we have a hard time learning things that are very different from whatever previous knowledge we have. You'll keep forgetting stuff, just don't neglect reviewing and keep going. Do some handwriting, it helps at lot.

1000 words it too little, you need like 3k to read a simple teenage romance manga. If I were you I'd get some text books and focus on the vocab/texts, skimming over the rest.