yankel> But I do not consider “interpreting gmara and rishonim” as “esoteric”.
I mean on what topic you are interpreting them. People (and computers also) train well when they repeatedly do similar tasks and can check their performance with some ground truth. How do you know whether you are right on the topic of Moschiach? Yes, you may have minimal skills to learn rishonim on simple topics, but here we are dealing with a complicated question on which nor we, not rishonim, have any final answers (except history of previous miracles, of course). That is why I am suggesting first trying to crack a complicated sugya where we have some hard data – and sometimes have more data than rishonim and see if you can figure it out. And, if you think that astronomy is not shayach for you – Rambam took some time (years?) to work on this, you could too.
Also, I bli neder will try to read the arguments of posters in this thread if they post any objective measures of their learning (SAT, LSAT, GRE, IQ, chess rating). Without this, I am not even trying, because I don’t know where the poster is holding.