So Many Silver Landmines
Silver landmines plague every imaginable landscape. There are myriad surefire ways to kill plants, to lose games, to make enemies, to guarantee failure, to tank quality, etc.
The beginner's best strategy is to avoid silver landmines. No winning moves -- novices compete to commit fewer fatal mistakes.
Mediocrity is that precise point when you can consistently avoid all the obvious landmines. After you internalize all that basic communal wisdom, you join all the others who've learned the same stuff. Somewhat by definition, middling folk make the unimpressive bulk of every bell curve.
Experts journey into territory where silver landmines are yet uncharted. As obvious errors tend toward zero, constructive feedback becomes more abstract, more personal, more inscrutable.
Most speedrunners' "personal best" times follow a hockey stick graph. Beginners first rapidly memorize a map of silver landmines via trial-and-error. Once that map becomes familiar, intermediate players burn that same knowledge into muscle memory. Becoming experts, those same players eke out performance via advanced statistics, deep introspection, reverse engineering, and whatever else it takes.
