It rather depends on you. If you can self-educate you in one area, why not in another one? There are people who cannot self-educate in anything, let's hope you are not one of them.
Both questions, "what is more difficult" and "what needs less thinking" are both totally incorrect. The idea is: there are different sorts of difficulties and different methods of thinking. Set aside the simple fact that different people think in somewhat different ways (the fact badly underestimated by many), the comparison between different kind cannot be built in any predefined way. Roughly speaking, this is like comparing apples and oranges. Even if you can compare two categories of such notions in certain cases, you can only build
partially ordered set (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partially_ordered_set[
^]). Set aside that the categories are also fuzzy. Ever heard of fuzzy set theory (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_set[
^])? :-)
I feel disturbed by the fact you are asking about both difficulty and "less thinking". I'm afraid to ask… Are you hoping for less difficulty and less thinking, or more difficulty and thinking? Let me tell you: if you are really looking less difficulty and thinking, you should better give up technological or scientific professions right now, before you loose more. Yes, as simple as that. I'm just hoping you are not like that.
And, finally, keeping the skills up-to-date? Another incorrect question. There are cases when missing few months of technological news make you professionally dead, but… if you only have only some minimal professional skills, you can quickly rehabilitate. Fundamental knowledge and thinking, understanding of fundamental science, fundamental working skills, analytic and synthesizing, this is what's the most important. Important is the ability to keep up, not being up at every given minute. But this ability itself is very important. There are good number of real dinosaurs, some even do good jobs, but the attitude to remain a dinosaur leads to becoming good for nothing. But the permanent chase for technologically fashionable, "cool" things, too.
—SA