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I also started with card counting and can assure you that poker is much more profitable with significantly less risk, especially with the quality of BJ games out there today. Given your background and mindset, you can probably become a reasonable low stakes winner with about 60 hours of practice in live or online games. I'd really suggest playing as much live as you can while starting out. It's just my opinion, but I think you can pick up a better feel for the game that way, and since it is slower, you'll stand to lose less while you identify and correct your mistakes than you would while playing 2 or 3x as many hands per hour online.

It is a very reasonable goal to earn a consistently great return playing poker. Live, you'll probably have to get to around the 10-20 level to make a decent profit, but online, you make a very nice side income multitabling the 2/4 and 3/6 games, especially with the rakeback deals and multiple bonus offers out there. A good winrate will be about 2.5 BB/100 at the low level games, but an expert can get upwards of 4BB/100.

My advice would be play, read, and post as much as you can, sign up on party and skins with as good a rake back deal as you can find, play $.5/1 with the goal of working your way up to 4 tables of $2/4 within a couple months. Get pokertracker, establish that you're beating the $2/4 for 2+BB/100 over at least 20,000 hands, then reevaluate.