I think your first mistake along your way is to believe you can learn it fast. It's only half your fault though. There are countless bootcamps or self-proclaimed coding universities on the internet that promise young, sometimes motivated people that they can learn XY skills and get hired for 100k$ a year without knowing jackshit before entering.
You wouldn't expect someone to become a lawyer, or a med doctor in a few months right? I think the same applies here. If you want to learn, it will take time, and you should start with strong basics (math & logic) and then learn lower level stuff first, instead of jumping straight into NodeJS and npm modules.
One thing to keep in mind though, is that some people have certain capacities for learning things easy. If that's your case then probably you don't even need all these courses, probably just practise, a lot of gooogling and determination should be enough for you.
I'm the "fast learning" type and I'm quite obsessive when I get into something. One year to learn how to do very basic steem interface (like steemnow for example) is too much too fast in your opinion?
Steemnow should be douable for beginner Javascript/HTML (a.k.a frontend-devs) programmers. Steemit provides a API to do REST calls. Which essentially takes care of all the block-chain tech.
Totally agree. Spending 20 hours a week, I became front-end proficient in three months, back-end proficient in six months, and developing non-trivial projects in nine months. You don’t need to know depth-first search algorithms to make a basic web app.