That's exactly what you will do - invest time, and energy, a lot of both because AWS is a victim of its own legacy. Everything is an after-thought, everything is messy and its genuinely painful to use on anything except some basic UI driven functionality.

EC2 and S3 and some basic hosting stuff is fine but newer services such as AWS Glue, Athena etc are a horrendous mess for anything other than 101 type stuff.