I'm just suggesting that the bottom-up approach is counter-intuitive to making a game. You don't need to understand how the oven works in order to bake a cake. And while understanding how the oven works might help you make better cakes, it's absolutely not necessary to make your first cake and I would suggest is an inefficient way to get started.

obvious to us, but not necessarily someone new to the domain

Of course this is my learning style, but I prefer to dive and discover these issues when they come up. You'll quickly discover the "obvious" bottlenecks and find out why they're obvious. And in my opinion the best retention of patterns happen when you discover and fix issues in your own code rather than doing bottom-up style textbook study.