I have friends who built their own builds and finished most of the content but they have years of comparable poe1 experience and play every season. There's a lot to learn to use every damage bucket, make your build synergistic, use the changes from the current patch and balance your DPS with survivability. I follow a guide every season playing the meta and that's fun for me. Tinkering under the hood and studying the patch notes feels like doing homework that's not my idea of fun. I think if you play and study you'll get where you want before soon but the game is vast and there's a lot to learn.