There's always stuff to learn in electronic music, and there's always going to be stuff to learn. I'm fond of telling people that the minute you're sure you know everything, then call an undertaker...because you're probably dead. But seriously, a DJ colleague of mine once pointed out that since music is now so dependent on technology, music has become harnessed to Moore's Law just like everything else technological. And I have no reason whatsoever to dispute that. Consider for a moment how much synth you get for, say, $1000. For that much, you can get a Waldorf Blofeld keyboard. Now, consider that that instrument is based, way back in its ancestry, on the PPG Wave 2.3, which was PPG's final iteration of their digital/analog hybrids. Oh, and throw in the PPG Waveterm B as well, because you'll need that to do any decent programming of wavetable data, etc.
Now, I distinctly recall that the Wave 2.3 itself, back in the mid-1980s, was somewhere between $4 or 5 thousand. Waveterm B, that was actually about the same. So, to get the whole basic PPG setup circa 1984, you'd have to drop $9k-ish, perhaps a bit more. And for that, you got a synth with a single digital wavetable engine, analog VCF/VCA signal chain, and analog modulation (EGs, LFOs) over both, a huge thing with a green-screen and 5 1/4" floppy drives that had serious cooling issues to get at the insides of the synth, and the whole mess weighed about as much as two boxes of hernias! Believe me, I know that last factoid first hand!
Waldorf Blofeld: TWO of the same sort of digital wavetable engines, similar (albeit modelled, and very well) modulation and signal chain, NO ginormous rackmounted computer (you use your own PC or Mac, the synth has USB), and I can easily tuck the keyboard under one arm and carry it around like...well, not much more than my old-skool Kawai K1. And that's all due to Moore's Law and its creep into music tech. Same goes for modular synths. I've programmed full-scale Moogs, most notably a 55 with the sequencer expansion, and with those, you're talking about a wall of control panel, and it's not...well, 'user-friendly' doesn't exactly describe a Moog modular. I found it very funny that Arturia's Modular V (their Moog replication) is just as much of a pain to work with as the actual article. But who gives a rat's about a monster-size Moog when you can slap the requisite modules in a Eurorack case...and yes, some of them being shrunk-down copies of the original Moog circuits...and carry it all around like a piece of luggage? I know what I would go for, for convenience's sake! Thanks, Gordon Moore!
Anyway, back on track...yeah, always make serious considerations about how pieces of equipment can work together when shopping for electronic music gear. You sometimes hear talk about the 'studio as instrument' concept; I prefer to think of my studio as AN instrument, not a collection of them, and that seems to be a great way to proceed. I recall visiting Syracuse U. about 25 years back, where I saw their original studio, which was designed for them by Bob Moog. And I noted with great consideration that Bob had set the whole thing up so that there were NO preconfigured signal paths. None. Instead, everything routed to a few rackmounted patchbays, and everything could interconnect in any desired configuration from those. Soooo...these days, I can look to my right, several feet away, and see a 17U jackfield where this entire room can be reconfigured on the fly, depending on what I might want to do. Everything patchable to everything. So, yeah...the studio here IS an instrument, not an imitation of one. And that's not a bad way to make considerations when equipping ones' self with electronic music gear. Certainly, you want to know what something does, but as important a question is "how does this work with everything else?" And always consider a factor I call 'abuse potential'; case in point: I have a string synth that has a CV input so that an external CV can be fed to the master oscillator (it's a divide-down polysynth) to transpose the overall pitch. You're not really supposed to feed an envelope into that patchpoint...but if you DO...suddenly you get pulsing, polyphonic acid-type twitters. The manufacturer never intended that usage, but if it can be done and it works musically, what the hell? Gimme a patchcord...
Like comparators, also. Now, that's a circuit with abuse potential. Everything we do in electronic music with those qualifies as 'abuse', actually...because these were originally cooked up for scientific instrumentation, not music. Their original use was to derive a logic pulse or gate when a metered signal crossed a certain voltage threshold, and you see loads of Nuclear Instrumentation Modules from the 1950s and 60s that are the same basic thing as our synth comparator modules, save for some differences in the voltages involved. But because there's some crossover between early electronic instrument builders and various scientific disciplines (with the most notable example being Don Buchla), a lot of circuit ideas crept from that end of the usage spectrum and into this one. In fact, I seem to recall that the first primitive voltage sequencers were originally developed at Los Alamos as an arming and firing device for the first atomic bomb test. We just use them...well, differently.
But as far as comparators go, there's two types. One is the basic comparator, where the module emits a digital '1' of some sort when a metered voltage either exceeds or drops below a set voltage threshold. And the other, which we're just starting to see in Eurorack (Joranalogue released one) is the 'window comparator'. These are neat as hell! How they work is that you have two threshold levels, and between them is the 'window'. So from one of these, you can actually get THREE '1' signals...above the upper threshold, below the lower one, and when the voltage is between the thresholds. To say the least, they're a kickass way to derive all sorts of trigger and gate pulses from all sorts of continuously variable voltage curves. Feed an audio waveform in, and the output becomes a variable pulse wave. Feed it velocity CVs, and it'll fire when your keyboard velocity is above or below the threshold, caused by harder or softer velocity attacks. And you can port that digital signal to anything else that can be fired by one...clock start/stops, envelope triggers, sample & hold clocking, the list goes on...
That's just ONE example. You can also do things like using an LFO to modulate another LFO, which then modulates a third LFO, and the result becomes a more or less nonrepeating CV waveform outputted by the third LFO. Put that thru a DC-coupled linear VCA, and use an envelope to control it, and you can increase and decrease that nonrepeating CV value every time the envelope gets triggered by...well, most anything that sends a gate and/or trigger. So, why not send that to something else...maybe a filter cutoff, so you get this strange, nonlinear tremolo that gets wider and narrower as you play.
So, yeah...it's much more than 'throw stuff in box, attach patchcables'. Modular gives you the ability to literally design an instrument...or several instruments at once, if the system's big enough to support several signal paths. And as I noted, you don't have to stop that designing process at the edge of the box; coloring outside the lines is how you come up with interesting results!
But yeah...if generative's your thing, listen to a lot of it, and keep looking closely at what you see on MG to try and sort out how what you hear works...or might work...or could be done better, what the hell? Same goes for pretty much any sort of music, to be honest. Also, explore the treasure trove of racks built on here by experienced synthesists, and see how they're doing what THEY do. MG is amazing like that; it's a virtual Alladin's Cave of electronic music ideas, concepts, and methods for those willing to take the plunge deep into it.
As for some of my generative stuff, see https://daccrowell.bandcamp.com/album/beneath-puget . Now, what's going on in there is a very complex patch between my Digisound and an ARP 2600, plus a little back-and-forth flow with an MS-20 and a shortwave radio fed into the modular system via audio and two 1/10th-octave passbands into envelope followers to derive CVs based on signal amplitude. It's not a set-n-forget sort of piece, as I'm 'guiding' the modular patch with eight attenuverters on the Digisound. But each time I change one of those settings, it takes the synth (processed through a sizable processor cascade) quite some time to come back to a new state of voltage equilibrium and settle into a new activity. The only 'normal' controller use occurs before and after three theremin solos, when I drop the modular's general pitch-class way down to nearly subsonic range and then bring it back upward after the solo's done. But much of what's there is that complex, non-repeating CV-controlled patch doing whatever it wants in between attenuverter 'nudges'. Kinda nifty! I actually concocted this piece as a test-run of a 'sublayer' for a longer piece intended for live performance, so what you hear there is a 'live' take, also, because I needed a replicable and performable result for the performance version. Make sure you have an hour or so to kill to hear the whole thing, btw...it ain't short!
Lastly, have a look at this: 
Now, what that is is a generative concept sketch I was playing around with some time back. Note that there's only four audio sources in there, the four Weather Drones. The entire top row and the rest of the second are ALL modulation, and the third row is the output chain which eventually ends in quadrophonic output. Someone was asking me about what I'd do for a sound installation piece, and I toyed around with that design for a hot minute. But this illustrates what I was talking about nicely: not much in the way of complex sound, but the sources for that sound as well as the filtering and processing are operating with a LOT of CV modulation of varying frequencies ranging from low audio down to periods of a couple of hours. It's not a bad example-piece for something you can set in motion for, say, maybe a month or two at low ambient levels.