[kick]

Knowledge generally isn't something you brute force.

If your solutions are bad, read a book on Lisp (that wasn't intended to be a pun, even if On Lisp was a good book and would fit the bill).

If you're not planning on leaving the OOP space, read a Smalltalk manual. It'll probably stick more, and I've never read a Smalltalk manual that was worse than contemporary books on OOP.

Knowledge is a problem that can be solved programmatically: profile where your bottlenecks are, then read until you understand the topics.

It doesn't sound like you've had any formal education (from the hobbyist comment), which actually means your situation is pretty hopeful. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit for people without formal education to grab that can sometimes even double their abilities. Grabbing a book on algorithms would probably do you a world of good.