Hey Hype... The only experience I had of scripting was using 'basic' on my Amstrad way back in 1985 (I hesitate to say that since I'm guessing that was the year Tyson was born! Well... I was Young then ok?... really!)
Anyhoo... Old dogs can learn new tricks. MEL is a pretty simple thing to learn. Sure it'd take years for it to become a 'natural' language, as in, I can't just sit down and write what I want from my own head. But within 1 month I wrote an autorigging script. A year later and that's on vesion 2.2 and has lots of bells and whistles and is a major part of our pipline at work.
So it can be done, but to tell you the truth, the most important thing is getting just the basics... so you can comfortably bug check, or have a inkling of what may be wrong, and are able to fathom the building blocks of other peoples script. Most of the actual writing is done with the command list open, the help files open... and a big fat book on your lap!