Very cool seeing someone completely naive going into this :)
If you want to read more about a bit more... cheaty way to do this, I have written about using formal verification machinery to straight up force the solution out of the netlist here: https://atx.name/electronics/asic-re/ . Could be a bit of an infohazard, but I think journey is the goal and yours was certainly more educational :)
This is the route I ended up going! I posted my own writeup here: https://pradyun.net/blog/reverse_engineering.html
I should add I have an EE degree (but have never worked as an EE), so even though I don't know industry standards like this sky130 thing, it's not completely foreign to me.
Curiosity is good but maturity is trusting that the problem will get hard at some point anyways, that improving the most efficient way is usually also interesting and is more likely to deliver desired things on time or at all, which can be a big deal if what you're trying to deliver it worth it, like.. a new MRI machine that detects new types of cancers, etc.
If you don't care about what you're trying to deliver, that's another problem that requires at least some questioning, though I understand people have families to take care of etc.