Advice wanted: Ecommerce type sites backend & frontend programming language recommendations.

Hi All,

Fairly lengthy text incoming, I did do a search first and even contacted support to see if I could pay for a study plan, that's currently not available and suggested I post here instead, so here it is, your comments are appreciated!

A little backstory first. I've been working as web developer for a few years now, almost by accident. I got started with treehouse to set up a site for a business I owned, then did someone else's website and they told their friends who told their friends and so on. Started with simple HTML/CSS sites and wordpress then more recently magento and magento 2 development. Some basic PHP, JS and server configuration skills I picked up along the way as they were necessary. Now I'm focused on improving my skills further, refining those self taught aspects and applying them to making my own custom ecommerce sites through treehouse tracks.

But there are so many now!

The ecommerce sites are my biggest source of income, but I don't really like dealing with wordpress or magento/2 as I feel like they are bloated and can very easily turn out looking the same. I'd like to build some sites that don't use those frameworks, are leaner and offer more flexibility, and are more "me". I know this is not a small project, and ecommerce platforms already exist for this reason. I think I'd get more satisfaction building my own preferred setup from scratch, I spend 8 hours a day in front of the computer so it's important to me that I like what I'm working with.

Unsure of which language to use for the task. My requirements as I see them right now are as follows:

Backend

• Able to store product and a large number of product attributes with their values,.
• Can easily access relational data between products
• Integrates well with 3rd party REST API for dropshipping/affilate products, returns that in what appears to be "real time" to the page.
• Some sort of responsive backend attached that is quick to update. On a slow server with a lot of products to update I've spent collectively days staring at white screens waiting for page reload after save in wordpress and magento.
• Most of my work is ecommerce, there is not a huge amount of computation involved, though I am intrigued by possibilities with web VR or 3D modelling. Not the slightest idea how that works, my gut tells me that it will require some sort of processing power.

Frontend

• Feels interactive, dynamic
• Can utilize some more interesting design elements and asymmetric designs, i.e not just plain ol' grid
• Contextual, content can change depending on user's experience, adapt to their behaviour on page or session information.
• SEO friendly
• is just a good experience to use, smooth, animated, not clunky, minimal reloading.
• LESS or SASS pre-processing at least in development stage. I have been using LESS for sometime but SASS seems to be more popular, I'd like to try it and find out why.

If you got through all that, you can award yourself a "I am a caring person!" badge and + 25 points.

I think I could work this all out eventually through trial and error and experimentation but I don't have infinite time, I'd really like some opinions on the "optimal" way to go about this and what languages or stack would best suits my needs given the info above. For bonus points, which tracks and order to study.