Woodznutz
It sounds like you could benefit from some combinatorics.
In biology, one must ask the very simple and basic questions. Why are there 4 bases and not 6 or 8, or 2? What benefit do 24 amino acids confer, that 12 couldn't?
The unsurprising answer is that 4 bases are the same as 4-d math in computer graphics - they "cover" the entire range of three dimensional shapes. In other words, give or take a few outliers, you can build any desired molecular (protein) "shape" using only the codons from DNA.
For example - an ion channel has structural requirements, in addition to its electrical properties (which btw are impressive on their own, the electrical gradient across a nerve cell membrane is around 100 million volts/meter). In an open state, the channel has to be big enough to let the ion through - so we commonly see proteins consisting of multiple subunits that are "pushed apart" by the ion, under the appropriate electrical conditions. These protein subunits are "globular", they're big round things that float around in the membrane - the only thing that distinguishes them is they "recognize each other", they have specific amino acid sequences that cause them to bind to themselves, which is how the subunits stay together to form an entire channel. Other than the shape of the inside of the channel, the rest of the shape of the subunits doesn't matter much, and you see this reflected medically, in terms of which mutations are deadly.
What is interesting is, you can look across the basic biochemical pathways, they are highly conserved in most or all species. Apparently, out of all the possible combinations, there are only a very few that work. And, it turns out, most of the conservation occurs around energy conversion and energy transmission. Which makes sense because the molecular shapes have to be under software control, so to speak. To be controllable they have to conform to the API of the energy delivery platform. This is why the "phosphate economy" is ubiquitous in all living organisms, and many if not most structural changes are somehow under phosphate control and influence.
