Yeah, I'm with you. I just feel like a lot of my "research" so far – crypto-wise – has mostly just been people talking about it, instead of me making an actual effort to understand any of it myself. So now I gotta go do that.
The technology is actually not that hard to understand, at least at a high level, it's getting through the "people talking about it" down to what is actually being done with the technology and why it needs to be a "distributed ledger". Often it doesn't and understanding that disconnect seems to often be the hard part.