If you're looking for a messy and nightmarish subject to learn, go for the WiFi 📶 standards 😂

I've just configured hostapd and wpa_supplicant on Linux and the number of options and variants there goes in hundreds - it's *way* more complicated than the usual "WEP/WPA/WPA2" as I used to see it.

Because on top of the software layer, there's also hardware - so you can have hostapd and wpa_supplicant that happily support WPA-PSK-SHA256 ("WPA2") but one of the wireless cards won't and no play...