Scales are double-edged swords, if you don't learn them at all it becomes harder to improvise and transcribe especially for beginners (it's easier to play with 5 or 7 notes instead of 12 if you're just starting out).
But if you rely on scales too much, you'll be missing out on a lot of interesting ideas. What you need to develop as a musician is the ability to recognize all twelve notes regardless of the context. You don't always get to know the chords and scale before improvising ; you'll have to listen and identify some notes before you do anything else.
For example: you may hear a minor third, a flat seventh and start with an idea over the minor scale, but suddenly you feel like playing a major sixth and then you realize that Dorian was the scale you were looking for. If you don't know well enough what a major 6th sounds like, you probably would have played the minor 6th and sounded awful in that particular context. But because you know very well what that 6th sounds like, you confidently use it in your solo, and you can always use the minor 6th later on as well if you feel it would sound nice again, or you like the tension it would create...
If a person were to analyse you solo, they would probably say that it is in Dorian and moves the Aolian mode, and that it's a modal solo in general... But you couldn't care less because you're just expressing whatever comes to your mind. You didn't make a conscious and calculated decision of using whatever scale degree over a given chord because the theory said you could. I'm not against thinking that way, we all rely on theory at some point. And many guitarist will explain their work that way but it doesn't mean that they created it that way. Don't learn more theory than you can handle. I made that mistake as a beginner, and I ended up using theory too much when playing. Theory can grantee your next note is going to sound nice, but it doesn't get you the note you want. For that you need ear training (a lot of it).
So how should you learn the scales. The approach I would recommend focuses at learning what the additional degrees (minor degrees in a major context, major degrees in a minor context, and the odd sounding flat 5th and flath 2nd):
Dorian : teaches you what a major 6th sounds like in a minor context.
Mixolydian : teaches you what a flat 7 sounds in a major context.
Phrygian : teaches you the minor 2nd
Blues scale : teaches you the flat 5th, and minor third in a major context (it's common to use the major third in blues as well)
Experiment with these modes, and focus on what the altered notes (compared to the minor (Aolian mode) and major (Ionian mode) scales) sound like. There are two more mode I didn't talk about which are Lydian and Locrian. Locrian is just a mess, it doesn't even have a perfect fifth, I never came up with an idea that uses the Locrian scale, it's a waste of time in my opinion, because event when I want to use a lot of flat 5th and flat 2nds, I can't give up the perfect fifth. Lydian is like the major scale, but with a sharp 4th. I sounds very nice but it's confusing to the ear, and it won't help you learn as much as the others.
So what I'm saying is learn new scales to better recognize all 12 notes, and you'll notice that these new notes will start to stand out for you as you listen to music, and you won't be too much concerned about which scales to use or learn. It will give you much more freedom when playing. So you may indeed end up using a scale you have never used before. But be careful, after learning these new "exotic" notes, never use them just for the sake of using them, keep it natural! You goal is to play the music in you hear mind, not being a smartass.