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If I had to choose, I'd choose practical experience over theoretical understanding. But understanding the world theoretically is a great complement to learning from practice, and it's much more difficult and challenging which has a value in itself. It can help putting your intuition about the world in a bigger context, and give you the tools for reasoning about and questioning your intuitions to eventually find even better principles and ideas. The scientific mindset you get from figuring out how the world _really_ works and not just what seems to work in practice for you specifically is really useful, even in non-science situations.
In my (current) opinion, knowing anything about the world requires knowledge about the whole world - to know where the specific fact fits into the bigger picture. At a first look, the world may seem incredibly complex and almost like complete randomness, but it turns out that very many of these events can be simplified into general rules - physical laws - which we then can use to more efficiently understand the world. How lucky are we that the world actually even can be simplified like this? We could argue about whether the human/social sciences have succeeded with making such solid theories as well as the natural sciences have or not... But, with this we at least don't have to learn all specific facts, only the underlying general rules.
Theoretical knowledge is a different beast than practical knowledge. You can't really have opinions about it in the same relaxed way as you can about normal stuff in your daily life. You can't go with your guts, at least not immediately. First you have to read about what others have found to be the most true about the world, because people out there have already thought about the things you're asking, and then you can start having opinions on it. You should be open to every earlier opinion before you decide yours, but being open also means being sceptical, so don't be afraid of criticizing the most noble truths either. But before you can criticize, you must learn about it so you know what you criticize. And when you've learned everything about something, you have to criticize it to develop your own ideas! Summarized: You can't take shortcuts to this type of knowledge.
Approaching the giant pile of existing science like this can feel overwhelming, and you can't read everything about everything, so you have to choose a path and ignore some stuff you don't find intriguing. In the end that will be what differs you from someone else who's just as ambitious and smart: Your personal passion and what choices it leads to. Follow your interest and read what others aren't reading, ask questions others aren't asking. While I said there are no shortcuts to real knowledge, this is probably the one shortcut that you have to take. Today especially, there is so much knowledge in the world that you can't learn everything (which is also a reason why I want to find a simplified structure that I can apply to all fields), so compared to the old days where you had to search to find good knowledge in libraries, today you have to filter out bad knowledge more than find good knowledge, so that you're left with the good stuff. Because information will be in your face all the time anyway...
Connect new knowledge to things you already know, so it doesn't become fleeting random information in your brain that disappears immediately (I've found the conversational AI interfaces to be good to get new knowledge to fit your current level of knowledge, at least those services who fact-check themselves and when it comes to basic conventional knowledge). Find a way to use the knowledge in some practical task, so it really sticks to your muscle memory and your emotions. The brain is all about connections, no idea in your brain is open-ended and without connection to something else, and if it is the brain will discard it as unimportant.
Write to understand, and don't skip a single logical step in your reasoning. Be sure to type every detail and assumption out, so you can see where you have logical flaws, and sometimes even where the major mainstream theories have logical flaws! And make sure to test your theory against reality, to see if it holds, and be honest and try to eliminate your bad biases (but keep the good ones, that's where your unique point of view comes from). Here is where the main difficulty of theoretical knowledge shows up - the rigorous testing and questioning and the refusal of letting any holes slip into the theory. When it comes to practical knowledge the holes and flaws are almost what makes it work sometimes (you can even build successful life philosophies and businesses on flawed logic), but for theoretical knowledge those random creative ideas have to be tested and questioned rigorously and systematically first - but they can absolutely work, because most of what we call true today probably came from spontaneous deviations from logical thoughts and from intuitive creativity by someone who had read and thought a lot beforehand.
A good aspect of attempting to find the most basic truths of the world is that it easily leads you down a philosophical rabbit hole or towards a philosophical dead end, where truth and knowledge themselves start to dissolve. Here you have an advantage against the big institutions - you can't (I assume) build a particle accelerator in your backyard, but you can think differently. You don't need money, resources or contacts to make your own worldview. You don't have to wait for anyone, and you don't have to believe in what others believe in, not even the most rigorous facts or the most acclaimed people in science. You can reason and observe your way to your own view of the world, seen from another angle that is unique to you, which could make you find facts that suit your style. And when the facts suit your style, you can find out things you couldn't find out before just by removing friction from the process. Just be intellectually honest and check your arguments against reality first, and then you can be as free-flowing about science and the universe as you are about your daily schedule and your emotions. By realizing this you can turn something as daunting as the deepest nature of reality into something graspable, you can move it out of the elite institutions and into your own head. Apply scientific scepticism to science itself and see new possibilities appear.
First learn everything that has proven successful, and then try new things to generate new knowledge. Most new ideas will be bad, but some of them will be good, and that new idea would also be impossible to find within the already successful frameworks. If it's good, keep working on it and slowly rework your whole system of knowledge, perhaps that new idea takes over in the end. I find a blog like this to be a good place to publish my attempts at a theory like this, and update it with a new post whenever I have a new idea. Some kind of middleground between a serious scientific publication and not publishing at all. I want the freedom of experimenting with my own ideas without pressure, but also the pressure to develop my ideas towards improvement, slowly and steadily. Don't be too ashamed of sounding dumb, because you probably will at first when attempting something as ambitious as this. Hard things require constant improvement, which naturally leads to your previous idea being much worse than your current one, but with patience and a little lack of shame this could eventually lead to something good in the end.
Learning something as general, all-encompassing and difficult as the underlying rules of the world is probably the one thing you can learn that gives the most benefits at once. You'll get knowledge you can apply to many different fields, and you'll learn how to learn hard things and do hard things in general. Instead of learning different theories about different phenomena, why not just learn one theory for all of them? You'll probably travel past all the other fields on your way towards untangling the most basic questions anyway. To understand the universe, you'll have to learn about life, consciousness, scientific method, chemistry, complex systems in general, mathematics, etc, not as separate subjects like how they're taught in school, but as areas you fly by while connecting the dots in your understanding of the world's essence.
And even if you don't get to a theory that lets you create supercomputers or predict events in far space, understanding some of your surroundings better is also pretty powerful, and will lead to at least some change in the world through your actions under your new worldview. Or maybe just instill a respect and humbleness towards the world.
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