We've all done it, and those of us who are dedicated continue to stretch our abilities, every time. Look on the bright side... in the age of digital cameras we no longer have to shoot a roll or 10 or... of chromes, take them back home, put them in the photo mailer and send them to Kodak, wait patiently for a couple of weeks for the little white or yellow plastic box of slides to arrive, grab a loupe and THEN analyze what we did right or wrong!!
I'm reminded of learning to write software when I was at school in the mid-70s. We had to punch cards (by hand, remembering the correct holes for each character so we could press the right combination of buttons on the cast-iron punch) and post them to Imperial College in London. They'd run them through their CDC machine and post the printed output back to us. Turnround time: one week, at best. One single misplaced or missing hole in a card meant a week wasted. It encouraged very careful programming and punching!
The thrill of being able to write sitting at a terminal and get an instant response was wonderful. I felt a similar thrill when I changed to digital photography. It made me careless at first, until I realised that I could spend time getting more shots right (or nearly right, or at least closer to being nearly right) and increase the rate at which I learned how to manage the camera.
Digital doesn't free you from technical worries, of course, any more than instant compilation and run makes software bug-free, but it lets you take far more pictures and see the results so much more quickly that errors matter much less. That, I suspect, allows people to find their own style in less time.
Jeremy
