I think the thread died as I stopped sharing updates 
I am not sure really how interesting it is to people what I am up to these days. My strategy vs what I assumed was the correct approach at the beginning of part 1 v2 changed a lot.
I think the pre-edit version of this post sums up quite nicely how I view things now. Even the post edit version would do and has the nice benefit of being brief
Basically, with the absolutely great resources that we have access to thanks to fastai, all that remains is to practice. I absolutely suck at doing practical things, but through what I have written I am able to nudge myself very slowly towards being a better practitioner.
I think if we add to this continuing to ask ourselves the question that @mandroid6 asks in his post - how do I improve? how do I change my ways to become more efficient in learning and doing things, then we are on the right track.
I would also like to add that I am discovering that the ability to do things doesn’t lie in knowing more math, watching more non fastai lectures, or whatever else might have seemed like a no brainer initially but proved to be a dead end. Our capability to practice more lies in accumulating little tidbits that improve our efficiency (learn debugging, etc), learning simple things about the tools we use (ctags, plotting with matplotlib), being able to focus better on what is important and producing our own util files for experimenting with a particular problem (a method for drawing a bounding box, a method for returning parameter count in a model, etc).
I can only hope that this is the right approach but for now things move still quite slowly in relation to how much time I invest in learning, at least to my judgement. But maybe that is how it is meant to be.
So I ended up giving yet another update and rejuvenating this nearly dead thread thanks to you @ecdrid, after your post gave it a breath of fresh air