Comment by RaftPeople

I don't think you can learn without doing the actual work where normal constraints apply so you can test and see the pros and cons of different approaches to different aspects of the problem(s).

You need a limited budget, limited timeline, limited capabilities in team and software tools+systems, and you need to be on the hook for support, maintenance and long term extensibility.

Software engineering is an optimization problem balancing all of the above and much more. There is no one answer to any problem, but more of a general sweet-ish spot (or more like region than spot) of balancing the competing priorities.