First, welcome to the community! :)
You don't need to use EF unless you really want to. If you do, I'd suggest upgrading everything to use a more recent version. Everything you're using has a community edition or free edition available. Upgrading will ensure that you have maximum compatibility with everything, and overall make development easier and faster.
https://www.visualstudio.com/products...https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/serve...Instead of EF, you could consider using the built-in DAL2 instead. You'll still essentially be using an ORM, but it's a built-in micro ORM. It originally was PetaPoco, but is a bit forked at this point.
http://www.dnnsoftware.com/wiki/dal-2In addition, if you use the most recent version of everything, you can benefit from using the Christoc module template. This is very helpful for newer module developers.
https://github.com/ChrisHammond/DNNTe...Finally, you don't need to be a front-end developer necessarily to get your own good UI. DNN has a built in form pattern to help you out. The website below is all still good code/examples, but it's a bit dated in terms of UI since it's using DNN 6.
http://uxguide.dnnsoftware.com/If your project is using a framework like Bootstrap in the theme, this could make things even easier for you, since could also choose to take advantage of the form pattern offered by that framework.
http://getbootstrap.com/There are many bootstrap-ready skins available for you to choose from. There's even a free one, built by the same person that creates the templates I mentioned before.
http://store.dnnsoftware.com/home/pro...https://github.com/ChrisHammond/Hamme...Aside from that, installation of DNN will generally always be the same. Follow the guidance on the wiki for that.
http://www.dnnsoftware.com/wiki/page/...Also, there's some great videos for module development.
http://www.dnnsoftware.com/wiki/modul...And great written tutorials on module development.
http://www.dnnsoftware.com/community-...