Turbo,
It's hard for anyone to top Martin's explanations. I'll try to give you a couple of pointers that work for me. Your approach of moving buttons until it looks better isn't as silly as it sounds. It a great way to learn once you have the basics down. My answers assume you're shooting RAW.
1. The Hue control allows you to make subtle hue color shifts in each of the eight color-band ranges. Underwater shots can sometimes take advantage of this to modify the cyan color. I use this on sunbursts occasionly. The Saturation control affects the intensity of the color and Luminance controls how light or dark pixels of a given color range are relative to their original values.
A typical use of luminance might be to darken the sky in an over under for example. I rarely use the controls individually. I typically use the TAT to select an area of color and drag it up or down to shift the color.
2. The order that most Lightroom gurus recommend is as you describe. Start at the top and work your way down. I like to get the WB close and the exposure "correct" then tweak the Recovery , Fill light, and Blacks to fill out the Histogram and get the image to represent what I'm looking for in the image. I rarely if ever touch the contrast slider, I prefer to use the tone curve for that. I almost always add some Clarity (+25 to +50) for underwater shots. Then I adjust the sharpening and the camera color profile. The good news is that the sequence you use doesn't really matter because the LR algorithm takes all of your adjustments into account and applies them in the "right" order. You really can't screw up too badly because your original RAW file is still there untouched. It's common to make a couple of passes through the controls until you get what you like.
3. Sharpening is an art all to itself. I'd recommend you do a search here and the photo sites for more info. The simple answer is that LR assumes you'll sharpen the image twice. Input sharpening (the slider) and output sharpening which LR controls for you based on the size and usage of the exported file. Every underwater image from my Canon requires some input sharpening of the RAW file. It's easy to over sharpen UW images that have a lot of detail in them like surface waves or macro textures. Those over sharpened images look "crunchy" to me. They just don't look right, especially when printed. Try adding about +50, radius of .8 and detail of 25 just to get you started.
4. In LR I love the Graduated filter and adjustment brush. The grad filter has really helped my over unders and portrait oriented WA scenics.
5. I haven't seen any underwater specific LR books. Your on the right track though using the videos. I like Matt Kloskowski from Photoshop User TV Once you get the hang of it it will come very naturally and the best part is you control how your images look.
Hope that helps a little, one other note, the tendency for us newbies is to over control. We tend to use too much of a good thing. (It's a lot like rum 
) It easy to get over saturated. Try getting an image you like then backing off just a little.
Have fun with it!
Steve
