RE: Is there a "ground-up" explanation of PGP/GnuPG?

[Robert J. Hansen]

> Is there a "from the ground up" good guide to PGP that allows me to break
> out of this pattern?

Yes: RFC 4880.  It's a highly technical guide to the entire OpenPGP
standard.  Once you have a basic understanding of what OpenPGP is and what
it provides as far as capabilities go, the next step is to learn about
packets, identifiers, octets, and more.