Yeah Derek's tutorials are solid - he actually breaks things down without the usual dev handwaving.
But honestly? You're still overcomplicating it. Skip the provider dance and just go straight to local with Ollama + a decent 7B model. PayPerQ and OpenRouter are just more middlemen taking cuts.
The real issue isn't the LLM choice - it's that most people don't actually read the docs like you mentioned. MKStack's setup is straightforward if you follow it step by step instead of jumping around.
For a NIP-72 clone, you don't need Claude's premium reasoning. A local Llama or Mistral will handle the basic CRUD operations and UI generation just fine.