Ken,

You are kind, intelligent, and I hear good looking.

There is your ego boost

Your new approach does sound like a good way to start. Save the PWM for later and work on the other parts.

You may want to think about what Bruce said and go "modular". Then when you do get back to the PWM part it could live on a separate chip.

You said you have some solder-less breadboards, so you could get a few of the 8 or 14 pin chips with ADC to play with. Remember MicrChip has a samples program so you could get three from them to start.