My first Mac was a 512, then a Plus, back in the day when desktop publishing was just beginning, and being caught up in that, designing and developing layouts for publishing - including some used in magazines of the day - has left me with a deep affection for compact Macs.
I even used my own personal SE for a few years typesetting fake newspapers that were used in 'murder mystery' weekends at UK hotels, and that was incredible fun.
My only two compacts are a Classic and Classic II, which are not the greatest examples of these early Macs, but at least reasonably affordable. The Classic II has become somewhat of a duplicate of that old SE, complete with all the software I had at the time. I replaced the hard drive with a BlueSCSI device which makes it near silent in use, and improves overall performance a bit too.
Welcome, from one 'new tinkerer' to another!