it looks like some of the things that you need to learn to be really adept at drupal are HTML, CSS and PHP, in that order. i’m an infrastructure guy. data centers, server racks, OSs, no problem. coding? i just haven’t had to do much of it to earn a good living. but to really implement drupal at a high level, you need to be able to code in at least some of the simpler stuff like HTML and CSS. PHP will really get you far in creating your own modules but as far as getting the look that you want, you need to be able to do more than just pick a theme. learn HTML tags and learn CSS.