Beginner looking to get into making guitar rock on the computer

I started taking a couple of music classes at the local junior college. One was on MIDI using the demo version of Ableton Live and the other was a digital music class using Pro Tools. I just dumped both classes today because neither class was focused on what I was most interested in - learning how to use a DAW to make music. It was a lot of lecture on sound theory and then you'd get assignments to complete with very little instruction on how to use the software. Which was fine for a lot of the students who have delved into making music on their own before taking the class, but I was just getting frustrated having to listen to all this lecture that didn't interest me at all and then not getting any personalized instruction when trying to learn how to use the software. The one useful thing I did learn was about how a lot of the realistic instrument sounds that are being used in DAW's these days use Kontact, which is what brought me here.

The kind of music that I'm most interested in making could be more or less categorized as guitar rock - electric guitars and bass guitars, drums, and keyboards. I might also get interested in some more acoustic style music like Americana or bluegrass at some point.

One thing that I think became immediately apparent to me is that I probably should be focusing on a DAW that is hopefully somewhere between free and cheap and easy to use to start and then once I run up against a wall in that software, I can start looking at the more feature-filled DAW's that cost more money.

Any recommendations for a noob that knows some basic music theory, knows how to use a computer, but is new to this whole computer music thing?

Thanks