I’m not a programmer myself either. I started using coda 2-3 months ago and how I learned the most is by watching the legend’s above (Paul Danyliuk) YouTube videos on best practices. It’s quite long 6 video series, 7 hours in total, and I just went along and did everything he did.
And I must admit, I didn’t fully understand what I was doing until I got to the end and then tried to figure out what was the purpose of each part of the doc and then things started makin more sense. But based on how you described what you think is going on behind my demo doc, you understand more than I did back then, so it should be easier for you to get value out of the series.
He also touches on securing data by basically making helper tables, filtering out rows so no one can see them and also locking the doc, but in LMS that would be of no use since it’s not meant to be used by multiple people. Even if you want to show the doc to someone, you can just share it with view only permission.
Using Cross-doc or Sync Tables pro packs could be useful at connecting front-end and back-end from different docs. I honestly don’t know, I never used them.
And there is this beautiful doc diving into encryption. Maybe that’s something you could use when it comes to safety.
I was about to use raindrop but when I saw that you need to pay in order to have a 2-level deep folder structure, then I decided to try doing it in coda. But yes, I can use it as a reference.