I have no knowledge on wood working.. but I can say it's amazing for the first try.
I write code. When I look at the code/logics that I have written years ago, I would amaze by myself that how did I really do it. Hope you would have similar feeling in few years
I agree the software is bad. All my phones bought after nexus 4 was made by Xiaomi. They give option to unlock bootloader and flash custom rom.
Not all the phones get official lineage os support, but almost all snapdragon versions get custom rom support.
I gave my Redmi Note 4 to my mom, which is 6 years old and running latest OS with recent security patches. None of the other OEMs were supported upto this period (just give exception to Samsung Galaxy 2).