I think right now I'm going to just focused on adjusting the turrets to get where I need to be. Would that be the best suggestion?
Not really; that's OK if you only want to learn how to dial elevation, but you miss a lot of the benefits. The reticle and turrets are a system that should work together. Yours doesn't, without some extra math.
Put it this way (for a very rough example): You shoot (distance doesn't matter) and through the mil-dot reticle see that you missed 2.8 mils low. With mil turrets, you can adjust 2.8 mils. With MOA turrets, how much do you adjust?
Or this one - your dope chart says you need 5.3 moa into the wind for a 620 yard shot, but you want to hold for wind instead of dial. How many mils do you hold? Quickly, you don't have long to make the shot...
Of course there are workarounds by either dialing or holding over in either case, but hopefully that makes it clear how your combination is far from ideal, and makes an easy concept far more complex. It's shameful of Leupold to have built mil/moa scopes IMO, but they still do.
This is somewhat like driving a car on American roads with a metric (kilometers) speedometer, only more complicated.