I don't do kill mails mostly because they died. It doesn't tell me if they lasted a long time or what.
This depends on the pilot. Very successful soloists will still have losses in their pet fits. Comparing kill histories to losses, you can guess which fits they are curb-stomping the opposition in. Knowing how to fly that fit is another matter entirely.
^^^ You're totally right. I'm going to admit to some laziness on my part for not just digging deeper into habits. Bad fits are a bit more obviously informative for learning at first, too, I think. There's a lot of room and personality in good fits, I think. It's something to aspire to, whereas bad fits are bad, usually for basic reasons independent of individual skill. I think that's why my focus has been on learning about specifically bad fits, and tried and true good fits.
I can't really speak with any authority being beginner, myself, but I think my point was that, so long as you understand what people tend to be flying, or what your ship tends to be weak against, you could probably err on the side of caution and not fly too 'inventively' at first while absorbing - There are a lot of options, and very similar-seeming things can actually be laughable in practice. I would argue to earn what's commonplace in your neighbourhood (that is assuming there
is 'commonplace') and then the mindgames can come later once all the pieces' moves are learned. Then, the idea is you move on to tweak it to suit your style:
From memory mostly. I have the basics down, so I just create a "standard" or cookie cutter fit in eft, then just start playing around with stuff. Seeing what happens if I drop a magstab for a second rep, stuff like that xD
In a lot of ways it's a conservative, booky way of going about it, and likely not the fastest or most effective, but beginners gonna begin. /shrug It's a lot of information to take in at once - first learning to put together, then learning to figure out what happened when it didn't work out. It's always logical, but it's something I think can be rough to suddenly jump into. Ultimately though, I would agree with everyone that the
idea is to get to a place where you're innovating, of course! Then you have a leg over all the guys just doing what I am. :p