A bit hard to guess what happened. But yeah, all of us go through many different failures unless there's someone with reasonable experience watching over. Me for example - I never had too much difficulty to pull strong weed out of a dwc in my early days. But the only positive thing in it was just that, nothing more. I was satisfied enough to not learn anything valuable and my skills didn't evolve. So a big failure can be better sometimes than stability. Age matters too.