Hi David,
Welcome to the world of astrophotography - it is indeed a journey, and I hope you find it an enjoyable one.
Like you, I started off using ZWO products. I got good results very quickly and found the ASIAir great and easy to use.
However, there is a tradeoff between ease-of-use on one hand and flexibility on the other. After a year or so, as I became more familiar with the ins and outs of astrophotography, I realised the ASIAir was never going to be able to support the functions I needed.
I found the sequencer very restrictive, ran into problems with connecting to different mounts, found the ethernet connections and WiFI very finicky, the firmware upgrades were very tedious, and tech support was not the best.
After a lot of research, I decided to invest in a dedicated PC to run my setup - which was a big move for me, being a Mac user
I also decided to use NINA software to manage my session planning and image capture. If you haven't seen NINA, I highly recommend it - it's very powerful and you can download it for free. Development is very active and tech support is great. It supports native drivers for ZWO cameras, as well as ASCOM - so all your ZWO gear (and almost anything else) will work with it.
If you do plan to get serious about AP, then I recommend NINA as your first next step - you won't be disappointed.
In terms of mono cameras, I recently made the transition to a mono camera (ZWO 2600MM) with filter wheel and (expensive) RGB filters. I'm not certain that was a good move. It is extremely fiddly and consumes three times the imaging time, which can be frustrating if you are time-poor. It also requires a ton of post-processing - which required me to buy a new, faster computer and a huge external drive. If I had my time again, I'd invest in a high-resolution OSC camera instead, and focus on capturing images and developing my post-processing skills.
My advice is to get really good at post-processing. Many amateurs invest a lot on their gear, but fail to get the best out of it because they don't develop their post-processing skills. I suggest you start off with something inexpensive - like Siril (free) or Affinity Photo (great and very reasonably priced) and get really good at it.
Once you master that, then consider a quantum leap to something like PixInsight. I have been absolutely amazed at how much fine detail it's been able to extract out of my old sets of images - but it assumes years of experience at image capture.
Also get good at taking calibration frames (very important - and mostly automated in NINA), integrating your images and managing a lot of image data.
Your Sharpstar is a good telescope - you didn't mention what camera you have but I assume it's an 071MC or 2600MC - which will serve you well for a long time. The Sharpstar is 335mm, so has its limitations in terms of resolution, so is probably not ideal for mono work or narrowband filters.
Also look at how well your camera is matched to your telescope. If your camera has large pixels (~3-4 um), then images captured with your Sharpstar are likely to be under-sampled. This means your stars will be pixelated and 'blocky'. If this is the case, then learn about a process called 'drizzling' - it is amazing at extracting image data from under-sampled images.
So - my advice - get really good at capturing lots of images, and learning how to post-process them, before taking on mono imaging
I hope that helps
Gary