Man the saying trying to run before you can crawl comes to mind reading that above post. Sheesh dude, where to start. Am not really up on Nvidia as I haven't had the pleasure as yet. Doubt it'll be much of a problem but still. Your researcher seems to be broken and ya may want to put that baby in the shop.
Absolutely not ... compiling is by no means the way the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of nixers, even very competent ones upgrade their kernel. Many folks who've been using gnu/Nix forever likely never compile a kernel. That's what all the binary goodness in the Debian repositories is for, already compiled for you. You install them with whichever package management tools tickle your fancy, everything from apt, to dpkg to Synaptic for gui'ey fans.
Learning what the hades is going on in a kernel .config file, which config options matter in "make menuconfig" is by no means an easy or 10min task. Been compiling kernels for years and yep, as a result of a TON of study, can now do a fairly decent job of compiling my own but it was more for the sake of learning about it and being able to fiddle with key config's or those not readily available otherwise that prompted me to invest the massive amount of time involved.
Performance-wise the stock kernel is going to do as well as a custom one(mostly and depending upon use case). Thus the main reason nobody usually bothers with learning to compile one. The liquorix kernel is a friggin supposedly "high performance" kernel meant for desktop gnu/Linux users, which the guy who maintains it puts out for people who want to use it. Not going into that further, take it up with google.
Sid = Debian's unstable software branch (repositories), if you don't know that or what it means ... you should probably stay away from using packages out of it. Arghhhh, sorry coffeenated and irritable at the moment but sheesh dude, there's no substitute for learning, experimenting, research and experience. You seem to be wanting to fly before you can crawl and it just doesn't work that way.
Might reread some of what I'd already posted in this thread and reconsider using Linux Mint or Ubuntu, while you learn and pay your dues. Debian (ESP stable) is not meant for latest hardware, not even remotely though it can be done by someone with the know how. If your system is working well enough as you have it though, great. If it's running Debian stable quirky and crapily in whatever state you've put it in, then LM/buntu perhaps ?