4 year Eve player enjoying ED for the first time

So I've always been a fan of Flightsims and I recently found a used copy of ED for the PS4 for 10 bucks.
I spent about a week with it and decided I wanted a Thrustmaster hotas.
Cargo runs were something I did in Eve for money so I decided to try it in Elite. Once the hotas arrived I got into it pretty heavy. Figuring out little things along the way. Worked my way up into a type 9 heavy and got bored. Read about the imperial cutter and ranks.. Ran a bunch of courier missions until I eventually became a Duke.
Started tinkering with some combat missions. Scanning beacons..locking onto signatures in the scanner etc.. Got pretty hooked even though I died a bunch.. (as an Eve player loss is pretty much the norm)
I went back to where the type 9 was parked a few systems over and I intended to hop back in and grind more cargo for the Cutter. Instead I started researching combat ships. I eventually settled on a krait. I traded my fully blinged type 9 for it and ended up with 127 mil. I left the station to head to another station to fit the ship. I hit auto launch. Nothing happened. I realized I was going to have to manually take off and land for the first time. The thruster buttons on the hotas are fairly intuitive but I had honestly never touched them! I've begun to understand more about flying the ship in the last 2 days than I did in 2 months of running cargo. So much that I didn't fit a docking computer and used the slot for something else. So now I'm hunting in RES sites and have managed to level up my combat skills a bit. I think maybe I'll hold off on that Cutter for a bit.
These are my major milestones so far.