If you're not an animator, and just doing this as a hobby, then why stress over topology?  Search the forum for topology or ngons, and you might turn up some of our discussions on this topic.  The auto-topo features in Zbrush have improved greatly.  If you can draw simple curved lines, you can create decent topology now.  Just draw some curves on the surface indicating how you want the automatic retopology to run the edge flow, and it does a decent job following your concept.

It doesn't get more simple than that, mate.  If Zbrush is out of your price range, then 3D Coat has the same kind of thing.  I mean, you don't need a perfect quad mesh unless you plan on deforming the mesh for animation, or if you plan on creating high res displacement or normal maps with detailed sculpting on the base mesh.  That's it.

Auto-topo is dummy proof, and should be good enough for a hobbyist needs.  Is learning to model a waste of your time?  Only you can answer that.  Would learning a second or third language be a waste of your time?  How about learning to juggle?  Learning to model is much the same, in a personal sense.  It's a skill.  You either wanna learn it, or you don't.