Right, I haven’t played it again today to give my hands a rest, but I hope that’s true. At least I can casually practice it in the minutes between matches now and hope to continue to improve it that way. The bafflement about why exactly it didn’t work is gone: in the future I can hope to avoid drifting into an unimagined category of sloppiness, which is what leads to those agonizing streaks of regression into near-zero consistency.
I’d almost compare it to those occasional out-of-place complex puzzles in The Witness that come with no hint about the what the rules are and also specifically turn off the usual graphical feedback about the reason why it didn’t work.