New user here: Should I avoid using Gantry at first?

Hi all. Very new to grav here, but I played around with it for a day or two and I understand the basics. I then found Gantry and it looks like it does A LOT for you.

The problem: when I look @ the directory structure of a gantry project it is very different than then basic grav skeletons/themes I've been looking at. For example, there is no user/themes/(themename)/templates directory where I expect to find the templates/partials. Gantry also a lot of additional directories such as includes/layouts/particles. This made it really difficult when I was trying to add another page-type from another project and I had no idea where to put it.

Would you suggest avoiding Gantry initially in order to get a firm understanding of base-grav first? Has anyone made the transition to using strict-Gantry and found it is worth it?

As a non-dev who has used both, I was glad to have learned the basics of Grav before getting into Gantry. So far, I've only used Gantry as a means to give users a visual interface to further modify some basic aspects of the themes (Helium and Hydrogen) used in my Grav skeletons.

I also ended up creating some basic Grav Gantry particles to help bridge my use of the two systems (http://learn.hibbittsdesign.org/grav-gantry5-particles). The concept and use of Particles in Gantry is pretty amazing in my experience.

I second @paulhibbitts, best to learn a bit about how Grav works without Gantry before throwing that into the mix.