Welcome! I’m thenewreligion over yonder on reddit too. Just me and Kyle talking to each half the time so grateful for the company! 
I share a lot of the same background but shorter time frame - maybe 2 years ago started looking for a new look that didnt involve basketball shorts and tshirts since i got my first job (at 39 :p) and really liked the selvedge and boots thing, sort of got drawn into all things leather and brass and denim, things that last, things made by hand, things made with skill and art and care but with a distinct utility. The rabbit hole for me before this was analog photography, maybe around 2015 when my first kid was born and i got a good digital camera but immediately got sick of taking 1000 picture to get one good one, always found myself craving more and more control over the creative process by exploring even more manual processes, making my own chemistry, repairing my own cameras. I was doing large format wet plates and constructing lenses from menisci and all that. I hit a wall about 2 years ago, stopped dead for a bit, and I think it’s cause I never felt like I had a deep enough control of the process, it wasn’t ever built from raw enough ingredients for me, to feel like I was truly the creator of any of it. I mean, at its core it’s a processed copy of something you see. And the utility of so much of it was nil. Wet plates were cool because they really do endure, and the execution of the process is a dance that needs skill and timing and thinking on your feet, and every once in a while you would capture a really special moment for someone they would be able to keep going back to, and then I felt like I was doing something important for someone I cared about. But mostly it felt like I was following a recipe and it felt creatively hollow. So around that time I got my first Alden loafers, Russell boots, Parkhurst boots, and feel quickly under the spell of needing to understand how they were constructed and patterned and all that. Started making mocs for the girls, then sprouted into the other small hand sewn leather goods. Also at the same time I got my first cowboy boots (ironic because I’m from the south and grew up raising cattle, we just wore bean boots and tennis shoes), china-made ariats, mostly for work. But I liked the look, the swagger, the attention darnit, and the more I read about the history, the dogma of traditional construction, the laser focus on function and durability, then what it had transformed into over time - a unique form of personal expression, an encapsulation of a dying culture I had grown up in, one of the truly american art forms; and seeing how broadly modern masters could create and explore within in what is at first glance a simple form, and that might seem limited in its variations to fancy stitching and inlaid flowers and wingtips and exotic leathers… Even making a simple clean 4-panel boot, doing that well could be the study of a lifetime. Yet people like Dunn and Miller, the fine folks out in Guthrie, the new generations sharing their process and progress and even blunders on instagram and facebook (Knight and Houston and Parker and Christo and Van Curen and Buckert and Guerin and Lauw and Pascal and Holly Henry and Wes Shugart and on and on) show that beyond mastery are so many avenues if expression, and so many ways to make the form truly your own, and more than other forms of shoemaking (although Amara HW gives them a run for their money) they can be a specific reflection of who the owner is and how they want to be seen. Anyway, I realized at some point that although I love a good stitchdown PNW or derby or loafer, and maybe I’ll try one, I want to commit myself to learning the truly american gentle craft. I don’t think I’ll ever be done learning within that one facet of boot and shoemaking, or run out of new things to try. And same here, I really just want to make for the people in my life, people I know well, so each one can be a really personal gift of time and effort and hopefully the fit and function as well as the form and pattern will be part of its value to them.
Tldr; its cowboy boots for me but shoes are fun too
But yes to your other point, it’s really neat to see the next stage after the explosion of information in the last 10-15 years, is getting it organized when motivated people like Kyle here commit the time to do it, and the people with the means motive and opportunity start making and talking. Im not sure everyone’s gonna have a landis in their basement, but the number if makers seems to be at a critical mass, and the ease of finding each other has reached the point, that it probably doesnt feel as lonely or hard to find advice and info as it once did.
In that respect I feel fortunate to get started when I did. Other than coming just a little after some of the great makers and teachers have passed. At least in the boot world, I feel an urgency to meet as many of the old masters as I can. I was lucky to spend a day with Paul Krause, but I won’t get to talk to DW, or Chappell, or Tex Robins, Jack Reed, Duck Menzies, Kimmel, Dave Little, Alan Bell, James Leddy, Glen Meeks. What I wouldn’t give to learn to make a last with Carl Lichte! Unlikely to meet Bill Shanor or Paul Wheeler or many from their generation that are retired. It feels like the history of that world is like sand through a sieve.
Anyway sorry I talked too much about boots and makers. I just think it’s the right crux of art and science and culture and history for me, perfect recipe for a good life-long obsession 