Ow brother what a headache indeed, and I get that you want to do this one all ourself, but what a project it has turned into

Last year I was putting a website online as an experiment and that was with some wordpress and indeed it also used elementor. Although it seemed easy, when you wanted to freewheel a bit outside of the elementor it got challenging for me and I even bugged out of it as it didn't end up looking like how I had wanted. 'Make a website in 20 minutes' is a big lie, even with elementor hahaa

So ...tons of respect that you are pulling though!