I am new to mapping and I am eager to learn. I attempted to make a campaign and I immediately ran into my own lack of knowledge and experience.

I don't understand the limitations of the engine or how to make it do what I want it to do. I don't know to plan and write a campaign story with characters and dialogue and a coherent cohesive plot across multiple missions. I don't know how to design good maps. I don't know how to program cutscenes (the engine doesn't seem good for it). I didn't really know what I wanted when I was starting out.

So when I tried, the result was terrible. There wasn't a cohesive story across the planned missions and the characters and dialogue were terrible. I couldn't get the triggers to act the way I wanted because the engine clearly wasn't intended for more than a couple of extremely simple objectives per mission. None of the tutorials I consulted had any advice for programming such complicated objectives.

For example, the objective for my first mission was extremely ambitious for the engine even if it was simple in concept. The objective was to built a set number of HQs in particular locations and hold those locations. This required numerous triggers to track different things, like where it was built, how many were built, and how many were destroyed. Furthermore, I wanted to keep track of these on the interface with an HUD for the player's convience.

The engine clearly wasn't intended for anything like this. That's why every official campaign mission has simple objectives consisting largely of killing stuff or getting from point A to point B.

So I wanted recruit consultants who could help make up for my shortcomings. Someone to plan the overarching narrative, someone to implement that narrative as mission objectives, someone to plan functional and fun map designs, someone to write the characters and dialogue, etc. I am not asking anyone to make a map for me, but for people who can instruct me how to make it myself within the limitations imposed by the Starcraft engine.

Basically, I wanted to be the exact opposite of the "ideas guy" that annoys modders everywhere. I know how to use the StarEdit interface even I don't understand the ins and outs of designing maps. I wanted to surround myself with guys who put ideas to paper that I can implement practically in StarEdit with my own hands.

I only have the vaguest idea of what I want. I realize that if I want to make a campaign, the only way I will be able to do that is with the help of others who know what they need to do to get the results they want.

You probably want to use scmdraft as your map editor because anyone helping you here will base their advice on the capabilities of scmdraft. Check the tools section for the dl link.

While I'm not interested in working on a project I'm willing to take a stab at specific questions you throw at us here.
Starcraft mapping is all about finding clever ways around the limitations of the engine, instead of dumbing down your plans. Just tell us what you try to do and we can probably tell you how to make it happen.

As for tracking building of HQs:
Place locations at every potential spot. Make a trigger for each location that checks if current player brings at least 1 HQ there. If yes add 1 to custom score. Before these triggers make one that resets custom score to 0.
Display Leaderboard custom score. That's all there is to it.

Should you become short on locations (254 max) you could place burrowed units near the HQ spot and center always the same location on these units and cycle through all of them. We can point you to tutorials on how to cycle through units, if you're interested.

Hope that helps get you started.

Learning how to use death counters is probably the number one thing that opens up the possibilities of the engine.

It's definitely a happy medium between the two. You're almost never able to do exactly what you want, but a suitable alternative is usually just around the corner.

Couldn't agree more with this. Seems like >95% of my triggers have a death count being used as a variable or a timer. Here's the death counter wiki.