Did you ever think that maybe the practice lock being easy is the whole point of buying it? You're supposed to build muscle memory on the clear one until you can feel each pin without looking, and that takes months of daily work, not a few weekends. Most guys who get good at this put in an hour a night for like six months before they can pop a real deadbolt in under a minute. You bought the tools and expected the skill to come free with them, which is like buying a guitar and being mad you can't play Stairway after a year. The 40 minutes of swearing is the actual hobby, that's the part where your hands are learning something your eyes can't teach them.

Do you still remember the first time you felt that pressure curve click? For me it was switching from a cheap tablet to an iPad in 2019 and suddenly my lines stopped looking like shaky noodles. I kept this old folder called "drawings before 2015" and opening it is wild. My shading back then was just me smudging gray blobs with the mouse, and now tilt shading makes it feel like the pencil is actually leaning into the paper. The time thing hits hard too, I used to spend a whole weekend on one face and now I can bang out something cleaner in an afternoon. It makes you wonder how much was us getting better and how much was just the gear finally keeping up.