Nthing Aidan & Handymac that you should practice on cheaper materials. If this is really your first attempt at woodworking, you're almost certain to generate a fair bit of unintentional scrap. You won't always have a clear understanding of what to do next, and to avoid being completely stuck you'll guess. Sometimes those guesses will be wrong. You'll enjoy that learning a lot more if it isn't expensive. Find a mentor who can help you through the basics if at all possible. I also think Handymac's strategy of buying the plywood first and then finding solid to more-or-less match it is a good idea. If I were to buy walnut plywood I'd have to special-order it; I'd have little or no control over the color of the plywood, whereas I can pick and choose from a pile of walnut boards.

My hubby designed and built all of our cabinetry for our kitchen remodel. The cabinet doors are actually solid maple for the shaker style frame part and the inside of the panel is actually maple plywood. The plywood is still a floating panel inside the door part... that gets kind of technical about the building procedure, but it was cheaper than using solid maple that he would have to join... He sprayed the paint on after the doors were fully assembled. You can see in the closeup photo that there are some hairline cracks in some of the seams where the shaker frames meet. I can honestly say they don't bother me a bit... they're not at every seam, but they are here and there. To me it is just a reminder that we have real wood under that paint and it's part of the character of the kitchen. But you would have to judge that for yourself, what bothers you is likely different than what would bother me. Our kitchen is a mix of solid wood and plywood, but my hubby refused to work with MDF. (The cabinet boxes are also maple plywood, the insides of my cabinets and doors are left a natural color with just a clear shellac coat on the inside.)

MDF is fine depending on the brand of cabinets. I'm assuming they mean just the center panels are MDF? I'm in SW Florida and went with all wood because that's what the Amish cabinet maker I used uses. I'm not quite in the house yet, but I knew going in that there would at some point be some hairline "cracking" of the joints. I'm fine with it as to me it's part of the beauty of wood. YMMV.

Something looks a little odd about that. Maybe what you have, especially since this is a new house and I see no grain, is actually an MDF core with tempered pressed fiberboard on the outside. In any case, a 3/4" flat head screw shouldn't do that to a 1 -1/2" panel. It WILL do it to a 1" panel if driven fully, however. A pan head screw is less likely to. You'll need to go to 1/2" or even 3/8" screws. I'd remove the screws, cut away the fractured skin with a razor knife, fill with spackle, sand, prime, and paint. There may be an easier way, but I don't know one that won't show. Maybe someone else does.