I'm in a similar situation, I just got my start a little ahead of you. I had one intentional and one accidental pollination (from excellent strains) in the last year or so, and I've been playing with the results. Chucking pollen is fun, and best kept without expectations. Actual breeding takes time and room, a perpetual grow with cloning areas etc. etc. etc. Anything short of that leaves a whole lot of the process up to chance.
I think it's best if you know from the outset what your goals are. If you are just looking to have some fun and pop some F1's and smoke the results as a one-off, then you're good to go. If you grow a single male and hit a female or two and then hope to go F2 and beyond -- by the time you are curing the F2 bud most of a year has gone by since you started, and since you did not choose your best male and best female from a large pool --
by default you have chosen them randomly.
As has been said, even the best strains when crossed will sometimes come up with duds, so good parents are not enough to guarantee excellence in a cross. When you go to make your F2's and you pick a couple of seeds out of the F1 group (which is by nature a sort of fruit salad of different pheno's) hoping to get at least one male and one female from your limited germination, you are by the nature of the process making blind genetic choices. You could accidentally pick the best two, that would be lucky. And if you do get lucky -- but you did not make clones of those plants -- the next time you pick two seeds from the pile of F1's the chances of repeating that luck are pretty small.
So it comes down to how much time and room do you have in your grow space for rolling the dice? I'm not trying to discourage you, but it's kind of like scratch off lottery tickets, you might get lucky, just don't buy a ticket if you are counting on it being a winner.
Just my $.02 and I'm nobody.
