I would venture to say that many, if not most of us here *did* learn it that
way. Not to mention by reading the mailing list for a couple years and
seeing what problems other people are having that we can avoid in the
future.
I second that.
No one here started out an expert. List lurking, FAQ reading, man page
reading, appropos searching, list archive searches and Googling are all
great tools that I've used to attack the issues I've faced using OpenBSD.
It's not rocket science, but it's pretty darn effective. And when you do
run into something you can't solve, there's almost always someone on the
list that can give you a nudge in the right direction. Sometimes it's a
rather loud nudge, but not usually, if you explain what you've done, what
your issue is, and provide a dmesg....