Kudos to you and the journey. I appreciate your honesty honestly about giving up on open source alternative for a quite cheap alternative for something you get to keep as your own is not a bad tradeoff.
Your story resonates. I am a self-taught creative and I get stubborn at times about wanting to use/bend a specific technology/tool to achieve a task; maybe it's a sunk cost fallacy OCD thing.
Your site design has character.
PS: Bookmarked your site with the tags - fonts, developer-blog, creative-sites, boutique-designs... on my firefox browser.