[Ididntdothis]

'I've been contemplating getting out of IT altogether because I'm not fully confident in career growth at this point unless I murder myself with study and ignore my family."

That's a real problem. I had a few years when I worked on pretty cutting edge stuff so most of my learning was on the job and could be applied quickly. In my current job there is a lot of repetition and stagnation so you have to spend a lot of time outside the job learning stuff which you then never apply. This gets really old after a while.