To be honest (And I just signed up right now to say this) I'm not at all interested in "pure" electronics engineering. Yes, knowing what components, schematics, semiconductors, etc are, and how electricity works is important, even if you are only going to be interfacing with Arduino/Pi type boards.
I am not an EE, I have a basic knowledge of how electronics "work". But in the past few months, I've decided to take my hobby seriously, and obtained an Arduino (or two) and a Raspberry Pi. I have some ideas, and I want to see what I can do. I don't want to do an EE degree, I just want to tinker, experiment and prototype.
I want to design an internet controlled lamp. Yes, those things are a dime a dozen these days, with IoT. But I've never been able to find one that suits me. I can take a lot of building blocks that already exist, and put them together the way I want and get the satisfaction of knowing I designed something, built it, then used it. I don't want to sell it.
I plan to learn along the way, where many people have already gone, I have a lot of guidance from the multitude of online communities, and I think I'll probably spend a lot of time here.
I want to buy some Off-The-Shelf DMX RGB lights, and use an Arduino (Yun or similar) to control them, taking input from an online service such as Electric Imp, and the interface will exist on my phone, allowing me to control the lights with my mobile device, the power, the colour, the brightness, and even chase and strobe effects.
All these technologies have already been invented, and at the end of the day, I may not even need to know too much about electronics, and simply learn to code it instead, but where's the fun in that?
I have rediscovered the joy of tinkering, pulling things apart, and re-purposing them. I have spent a lot of time in the past few weeks building circuits on a breadboard, and used switch or sensor inputs, with or without a micro-controller, to figure out how different components work together. I'll probably kill a few along the way, but I don't consider that a bad thing.
Thanks Dave for bringing up this topic, as that's what finally got me to sign up here.
EDIT: Having re-read the thread, I can see a lot of hostility for Arduino and RaspPi communities. Arduino and RaspPi are designed to bridge the gap between the software and the hardware, there are users who will be more interested in one side more than the other, and maybe they don't want or need to deal with the other side.
I'm only finding my own way right now, I've dabbled in electronics, and I've dabbled in coding, I know that I like the flexibility of working in both spheres. I've been teaching myself to code for Arduino, and I often find myself building 5v circuits on a breadboard with switches, wires and LEDs (and some basic logic ICs) just to see how it all works. I'm yet to purchase a Soldering Iron, it's on the to-buy list, but for now, I'm simply happy to tinker on a breadboard.
On Sunday, I purchased some 7-Segment Displays (Common Anode and Cathode), and figured out how to use them with a 74HC595 Shift-Register and the code required for an Arduino. Last night I purchased some 8-way DIP switches and some BCD/Hex encoded rotary switches and a "4511" BCD decoder to do the heavy lifting of driving the 7-Segment Display, and after I wired it all up, I couldn't get it to work. I've been thinking all morning about it, and I've come to the conclusion that it didn't work, simply because I forgot to put some pull-down resistors on the inputs, thus the "4511" was unable to determine the LOW state of the inputs.
I'll go home tonight and wire it up again with a few 10K resistors, and see if that fixes it.
And that's what I do. That's what I enjoy, you can only read and watch so much, but actually getting your hands-on is where the fun it.