I think, your absolutely best bet, would be to discuss theory with other musicians that you play with. If you know the most, educate them, if you know about what they know, work with them, and if you know less than they know, learn from them.
a lot of people get caught up in this idea of learning a bunch of scales and chords in a vacuum then being like "okay, now, how do I apply this?"
That's not an inherently poor approach, but it can get inbetween actually creating music. I prefer to approach theory from a "okay, I am creating music, now, how would I quantify it? oh... like that, okay cool, that's my theory"
There are standards, and systems and formulas, and common chord progressions, commonly accepted cadences...etc...etc. But all that theory is the culmination of what hundreds of composers(thousands?) over the years have produced musically. When they were making their music, they didn't think of it in terms of 'how am I applying this theory?", it wouldn't be till later someone says "okay, so that dude did that really cool thing, just what was he doing exactly? oh it was such-and-such, cool, well, I like that idea, I wonder if I can take that and use it with such-and-such, hey, that sounds pretty interesting"...etc..etc.
In short, there is no 'how the bass was meant to be played', there is a collection of how various composers and performers have played the bass over time and what we call all that stuff and ideas on how those ideas can be applied, but don't confuse that with being some sort of rule book.
Of course, this is just my opinion, I ain't been playing 20 years, but I've studied theory for 7 or 8 years and I have found that the most progress in my playing has come from putting theory in the back of my mind and not worrying too much about whether what I'm doing is right or wrong theoretically, because, if I can hear it, it's right.
