Honestly there isn't much to say about my "music education", I never went to a music school and learned music theory by myself, and I'm still learning more advanced subjects. That, and I just listened to a lot of orchestral music since I was a kid. As for libraries, majority of the instruments indeed comes from East-West composer cloud. And honestly, having good libraries is not as important as having actual technical knowledge. Most of the self-taught composers out there seem to think that higher quality libraries will solve everything, while you can spot the basic mistakes in their music... while it can help and improve overall quality, it will not help with the lack of effort and poor mix.
Have you heard about Vienna Library? Honestly except a good quality of the samples I don't think it's all that good. Lack of separation between different mic positions, low number of round-robbins makes it sound repetetive, and by itself it's not particularly flexible. And now there are far better libraries out there. Yet it's good enough for someone like Danny Elfman (when he's not using real orchestra, but he himself stated in the VSL interview that he often layers real orchestra with sampled libraries). And that alone says something.