Am I stupid/bad at language learning or have unrealistic expectations?

Long story short WK won’t be sufficient on it own to start reading in earnest.

A useful link: Joining the Absolute Beginner Book Club: Preparation and First Reading Experience Expectations

Between WK10 and W15 you can definitely start to practice reading but you will have to acquire vocab there is no shortcut for that and the WK vocab is for kanji drilling not general usefulness.

Some choose to go for graded readers like Satori.
Some choose to decipher through something they have personal interest in.

Generally speaking either:

  • you are really motivated to read something specific and then you can decipher it sentence by sentence reallllly slowly but you’re interested in the material.
  • you want to ease will easier material but you may find it boring, reading for the sake of practicing reading.

Disclaimer: Your first hundreds thousand “real” sentences (aka not written toward a learner) will be hell to parse. This is normal. You are not bad.

My personal experience

At 2.2k vocab and 800 kanjis I updated my practice to always read and try to understand the SRS example sentence on jpdb. At this point I could roughly get the gist of maybe 35% of the sentences.
From this point every thousand sentence read has brought a significant aptitude increase.