I can't speak for Poloniex. I've seen numerous threads in Bitcointalk about Poloniex issues but I've yet to encounter them. That being said, I did eventually move all my coins to Bittrex because of these same issues. It's a shame because I prefer Poloniex's UI and manual trading features more than Bittrex.
I'm still a newbie when it comes to Gunbot, I've been running for about 2-weeks and tracking my Bittrex balance at the end of the day. Some days are positive, some days are negative but the trend is about 1-2% profit a day.
My suggestion for you since you're new to crypto would be to hang out in Bitcointalk.com for a few weeks, manually trade on an exchange during that time using Gunthar's Bollinger Band trading strategy here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1715214.0;topicseen, and generally immerse yourself in crypto. Setting up and managing the bot isn't difficult, but if you're trying to do that while also learning trading basics, and learning crypto then I don't think you'd be successful. It'd also prove to yourself that you're serious about all this. If after two-weeks you're not interested in it then you just save yourself the cost of a license.
Then... if all is good then hit up a reseller and purchase a license! If you use the ones in here you'll typically get it 10% off
and they help you get setup and running.