How long have you been writing? You say alot about being a better writer and stuff, and the fact you can handle such a daunting task as this massive rewrite makes me think of you as a seasoned elder, like, writing fanfic for close on ten or fifteen years since you were twenty
(I'm realizing maybe this is a tad weird)
Not weird at all! These kinds of questions are fun.
I'm a storyteller by nature - been making up tales to tell people since I could form words - but I only started taking writing seriously when I realized it was what I wanted to do professionally in high school. I'm 30 now (turned so this year!), and I knew around... I want to say sophomore year that I would need to start actively practicing and building up experience if I wanted to make this dream a reality. And I'd need to learn how to actually be confident enough to show people my shit and not want to immediately destroy it or delete it after posting it out of shame. Sort of still figuring out that one.
I started with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure threads when I was in late high school on forums, then moved on to an original adventure comic right about the time I graduated, which took about 6 years and ended 4 years ago. I've done other original stuff since then, but that's not the important part. The point is that all three of these were made to build up my writing skills for future works. The Redux, I cannot remember for the life of me how old it is or when I started it, and I'm too embarrassed (and a little too upset in my memories) by it to go looking, but it was my first foray into a large-scale fanfic project. Iterum is easily three times (and likely more) as large as the Redux was ever going to be, and I intend to be with it for quite a while - or, at least, for as long as my passion for it remains.
All that rambling to say, it's been a lifetime of doing this for fun, and roughly a decade and a half of writing like I mean it!