For better or worse if you are unwilling to look at other's source you are going to go nowhere.
You'd think someone would've whipped up something by now... bitcoin being such a large scale business and all.
This is the exact reason there isn't a lot of well written "academical" papers on bitcoin's technical details. It is large scale, making such documentation complex and time consuming to create, but there aren't many people willing to pay for someone to put in that effort. There are plenty of people who are capable of just looking at the source, so rather than paying one person to write documents, and another to write a program based on those documents, most businesses find it to be cheaper to just hire people who can read source to also write the source.
If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask them here, you're likely to get good answers. Perhaps you'll be the first to actually create some well written and highly useful documentation.
