Way back in the mid-70s I had a roommate who managed to borrow a Mini-Moog, a Moog Sonic Six and an ARP 2600 (from a university experimental music lab) for a long weekend. None of the rest of us had ever even seen a synth up til then, nor did we have much in the way of musical knowledge. Using the ARP he gave us a quick tutorial on the general functions of the VCO, LFO, VCA, VCF, Sample & Hold, control voltages versus audio signals, etc. It only took about an hour for us all to get the gist of it. What a fun weekend that was. What we didn’t know for sure how to do we at least had a notion of what to try.
It might be useful to subscribe to only a few plugins, and to select ones that have good documentation. Check out my thread-in-progress: John's "Gold Star for Documentation" Awards - #20 by john_rose and seek out the plugins I actually award a gold star to. That is not to say that there aren’t many others with excellent documentation, but I just haven’t gotten around to them yet.
Two standouts are Bogaudio and Count Modula, which offer a lot of simple but indispensable modules that are clearly described in their manuals, and are fairly easy to figure out just from looking at the front panels.