Luminos, I'm in a very similar position to you, though possibly slightly further along. This is the first fighting game I've been taking seriously. I bought a sfiv tournament stick for sfiv, but modded it straight away to an octaganal gate. after a while of getting my arse kicked online I kinda gave up.
I played calamity trigger after it finally came out over here last April, and continuum shift when it came out last December, and although I read and understood the theory about what I was supposed to be doing during a fight, like you I had no idea HOW to learn a character.
Dustloop articles I read a couple of months ago helped with that. I changed my gate back to square, dropped Hazama, and started learning Ragna from scratch.
Although I am still terrible, and have been sorely tempted to just give up a few times, I have noticed definite improvement. I've actually won some online matches too. I no longer mash buttons (all the time...), I can keep some basic pressure going, I can hitconfirm, and several times now I've pulled admittedly basic combos from random hits.
I just wanna say keep going, dude. It'll come.
And thank you to everybody on Dustloop.