I bought all-in-one bundle a year ago. The most interesting ones were Helmet, Pocket Action Cam and Car Modelling (in order of difficulty). One of reasons to buy a course is self-motivation that makes you finish it ('cause you spent money). And after finishing it is important make similar model (some other helmet or car) yourself. I learnt much more on my own projects by solving unexpected problems. Once you've repeated all the tutors from youtube one-by-one (even those you're don't interested in) then you can think to buy some course that can help you to advance further

You have to select all the guide curves one by one in the correct order. Plasticity cannot figure it out automatically. Furthermore what curves are guides is also matter - result surfaces will be different as you can see

Basically it is a question about quality and time. Ask yourself what quality level of surfaces do you need? For 3D printing it is low, for product rendering it is high. How much time are you ready to invest in modelling? Hobbists usually not limited in time but for professional artist speed of work is valuable. I have studio version and in my experience XNurbs works better almost in any case and where Patch doesn't work at all. In many videos Nikita show examples and difference XNurbs vs Patch/Loft. You can check it out on his youtube channel. I use models for rendering so I never regretted my choice, Studio version saved a lot of my time. Look for examples of comparison and try to achieve the same results with patch/loft. It is not impossible but slower in many cases.

You can apply Deform to a single face only (as it is shown in manual video https://doc.plasticity.xyz/sketch/deform-curve). So it quite hard to use it on your fragmented surface. And to make this curved surface with one face is possible but not easy task. I would simply use bump texture during render.

🤩Gorgeous concept!