I also went backwards on this. I started with early SS, advance through all the way towards modern games, and not long ago added EM. I thought the EM would be so much more interesting because the logic is all there in the open. That took me through a bunch of stages of confusion with EMs. I was spending hours with schematics trying to figure out some issues that would have been simple for me on an SS game. And then one desperate day it clicked. X must not work because Y must not be connecting. Boom, issues were easy (well easier) to find. This isn't working? That means a bad switch in the alternating stack. All of a sudden EM games made more sense.

That is a long winded way to say that different generations of games are different. And each one requires special logic to understand. But that shouldn't scare you. It's just something new to learn. So if you add an SS game, just give yourself time to learn the new way of how it works. Your logic of EM games will serve you well. And you will add a better understanding of electronics. The density changed, but the principals didn't.