Thank you very much for the hint.
I decided to go step by step through the manual because first of all I wanted to understand the basics of render settings and find out how does each parameter affect the final render.
I'm slowly convincing myself to change my approach and learn right from the mentioned vids, especially taking into consederation the time I spent figuring out why the heck is my default render different from anythyng I've seen
Can you please tell me can I find somewhere the scenes used in the ChaosGroup tutorials?