re: Advice from a guitar semi-newbie to any others on this board wanting to learn.

Scales and theory are how you get good, but a beginner isn’t at the stage where they can really take advantage of that yet. Beginners need to focus on the basics first:
1. Reading tabs
2. Fretting
3. Strumming
4. Bar chords
5. Quickly changing between chord shapes to develop muscle memory
6. Strumming along with simple 3 and 4 chord songs
7. Palm muting
8. And learning simple blues progressions in E and A

Once they’ve got that down, I would start moving on to scales (starting with blues pentatonic, then major and minor), then box method, then basic music theory (major/minor progressions, 1-5-7 songs, 4 chord songs, verse/chorus structure, etc).

Once they’ve got their hands dirty on that, I would move on to bends, alternative tunings, vibrato, finger picking, taps, pinch harmonics, etc. If they were an electric player, I’d start educating them on effects and amplification.

Next would be modes (dorion, ionian, etc), then finally more advanced techniques that I haven’t really mastered like chicken picking, slide guitar, sweep picking, and more advanced song writing

That first phase, especially bar chords and fretting is the hardest and most painful stage, but if someone can pull through that, it gets much much more fun.