but QM feels especially unapproachable

The knowledge of fundamental physics and the mathematics necessary to perform and understand it are known to few, maybe some tens of thousands of people at most, and commitment to reach those levels entails almost a decade of graduate and post-graduate study. Yet what if it was all much easier and much harder to understand? What if the necessary knowledge was finite and more rapidly attainable to a broader population than those select few? What if there was a way to identify and abstract the most basic physical structures, a list of all the tools to build and operate on those structures, and a user's guide to describe how to use those tools?