New to vinyl, and in a bit over my head. Looking for recommendations before I ruin anything.

So I'm fairly new to vinyl and turntables, I've spent a bunch of time reading and watching youtube videos. But now I guess I need some validation before I either just waste a ton of money buying stuff, or ruin all my vinyl also wasting a ton of money.

I bought a Pioneer PL-5 with a Pickering XV-15 625e cartridge, I was also told that the needle was newly replaced before I bought it. Brought it home and it played decently, but the speed control was going crazy, so I tore it down and sprayed the speed selector and adjustment with Deoxit, that fixed my speed issues.

Now onto my current issues, while balancing my tonearm after the disassembly (first time doing this) it hit the plinth decently hard. Did I ruin my needle? If I did does anyone have any recommendations? I've heard that LPGear and JICO make good replacement needles. Should I stick with the Pickering cartridge?

Second, I'm having trouble setting the tracking force, I balance out the tonearm, set my scale to 0 and then added 1.5 grams to it then 1 more for the brush since it is self supporting. I then tested it in on a blank track on the Shure An Audio Obstacle Course LP. I was unable to get anti-skate to have any effect on it. I then flipped the brush up and rebalanced and set it to 1.7g I was able to get anti skate to work. Should I expect the anti-skate to work properly on a blank track with the brush down? Should I just remove the brush to simplify the whole thing?

I suspect the brush supports more than 1 gram, since when adding 1 gram the brush barely touches the record, maybe 1 -2 bristles and the needle floats above it, I have to set it to more than 1.5 to even see the needle contact the record. Which I tested on the blank track of the test record. Another thing, is when I set anti-skate the tonearm swings out when I lift it up. I have tried my best to balance the whole turntable using shims, but I'm not 100% sure its perfectly level. Since I get a lot of different readings based on where I put the level(s).

At this point I''m about to just blow a bunch of money on buying a new needle, a force gauge, higher quality bubble levels... I guess I'm in over my head, and all I can think to do is spend more money, and really all I want to do is play my albums without tearing them apart.