Having a sit-down with a knowledgeable person would help a lot using YOUR stones, IMO.

Honing is rather easy to learn, given the skill set, on synthetics with the right instruction. If you wing it and listen to everyone, notsomuch.
Staying the path and not veering toward naturals (as some will suggest) will keep a base of knowledge growing.

Always time for the other things later after you learn to get good results on some more standardized synthetics, I suppose.
JMO