If you can afford it and have space in your kitchen I'd recommend you get a rice cooker, preferably one with 'fuzzy logic' and ceramic bowl. It removes the starch preparation almost entirely from the meal preparation process and allows more focus on the rest of it, and it becomes trivial to turn some leftovers into a decent meal or make 'fast food' by putting some pre-/factory-made dumplings and greens in with the rice. Commonly rice cookers allow setting a start time in the future, so you can prepare dinner or lunch at breakfast and it'll be ready at the appropriate time.
The 'pasta method' is fine however, ignore people that whine about it. It's also rather easy to learn how to make paella and jollof and similar, which is a really nice way to cook with rice.
Then I learned about the pasta method. It probably closed about 80% of the quality gap in my finished product.