Absolutely you can read it to death and still glean nothing from it. I don't know how many times I've had to reread, and I usually continue to do so. And to that end it takes more than just reading it, but if one wants to ask some profound questions about the world around oneself now that one doesn't have someone breathing down one's neck then one should probably start where others left off. It'll save a little time.
The point where you took a wrong turn was assuming that philosophy is all based on hearsay. There's been a lot of effort to ground pretty fundamental ideas to what we understand about reality, to the extent that we understand it. It's worth working to grasp some of that. It helps. If you like quantizations and mathematical/logical formality that exists as well, but mind that you'll probably want to do a lot of comparative reading.
To put this in programmer's terms: why would you re-implement libc when you haven't even looked at the existing source code or surrounding arguments? That would look like a fool's errand: not because the effort isn't worthwhile, but because you could save yourself a lot of time and use the lessons of the past to inform your next efforts rather than blindly making all of the same mistakes or rediscovering what was already known (to our best efforts). Worse, you might end up wandering around ranting about how someone should implement a core supportive library for a common systems language without ever looking to find out if there is one in the first place.