"I am far from expert with Java, but at least I could get a program running and have it talk to the Steem blockchain."

I'm not an expert on it either, but I never give up, there are no limits to learning something as long as there is interest. A hobby that takes a lot of time.

"So, first I started reading/watching tutorials for nodejs and npm, but everything I looked at pointed me back to a series of prerequisites, so it seemed like I kept moving away from my goal"

I know, I haven't read them all yet, there are so many tutorials about it, I also like experimenting with steem-python. To experiment, I set up a laptop with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

I wish you much success with this 👍