The spirit of learning is why we are all here! And yeah many cultivators like yourself were doing things right just going on instinct~
Making medicine, Chechero
When I began to grow there were no books on how to grow cannabis. The Internet and sites like this had never even been imagined. There were no seedbanks where professional genetics could be purchased. You had to grow by the seat of your pants, so to speak.
The biggest early break I had in regards to growing came from meeting a guy I always refer to as 'the old hippie.' He wasn't really old, he was just enough older than me to seem old, that and he looked like Jerry Garcia and just looked older than he was. I worked evenings and weekends in a gas station and he used to come in driving a 48 Chevrolet. I did not know how to roll a joint yet and one evening I had forgotten my pipe and my friend who worked with me and I wanted to get high. 'The old hippie' came in and I figured he had to get high so I asked if he would roll a joint for me. He not only did but he taught me how and ever since I could roll with the best of them. In return for his help I gave him a dozen 2-liter bottle of 7-Up that we would give away one with every 10 gallons of gas. He felt he should give me something in return so he gave me a bud and it turned out to be the first sensi I ever saw/smoked.
When he came back in the next time I asked him about it and basically he took me under his wing and taught me what he knew. It was late 1972 and he had built his own hydro setup and he knew to separate males from females and he had a microscope and looked at things I had never heard of before, things that later I learned were called trichomes, and had a theory about how their coloration related to different levels of potency and when to harvest. The guy was decades ahead of anyone else I knew at the time.
Much of what he taught me later did turn out to be fact, though not all of it did, but it was mainly him that got me thinking more and paying closer attention to things and spotting the correlation between certain things. He taught me how to connect the right dots rather than the wrong dots, for the most part anyway.
Now today many of the things that he taught me, and the few things of his that I slightly fine tuned or polished, along with things others we knew learned through trial and error and then did are proven facts, but oddly many people today either choose to ignore them or inexplicably in this day and age somehow unaware of them.
There is little to no reason or need to play connect the dots in this era. What is known to be true is just that, true, and what dots are left to be connected are on a level that they will never be able to successfully and accurately be able to be connected in a basement or a closet or an attic or a store room or a spare room or a garage or in a green house or in a backyard and instead will only be able to be accurately connected in high tech labs.
That is why I am always amazed by the degree of refusal of facts by so many and their belief that experimentation will discover something new and amazing.
In all the years I have spent on sites like this reading about some 'new experiment' or some fad or voodoo growing technique that people go on and on about and call new and modern, the only one I can say I do not recall knowing to have been tried decades in the past is growing a plant upside down.
'The old hippie' and some other growers I knew wore out their library cards checking out books on horticulture and would read them cover to cover and tried various things to see what seemed to equally apply to cannabis plants, which turned out to be almost everything. Various training/shaping methods for ornamental plants were tried and the same basic techniques that many years later were given pot growing names were tried.
Some were impractical at the time because most growing was done outdoors due to indoor setups being very crude by today's standards and the crude indoor setups held back the degree of success of some methods, but the various methods of growing that are the norm today were in almost every case attempted and some with an acceptable enough degree of success that some growers would repeat them from time to time, sometimes often.
As much as the younger growers of today will never believe it, when it comes to growing there really isn't anything new under the sun. The only real difference is some things are practical too do now when they were not in the past. Due to advancements in indoor growing equipment ideas of the past that were impractical now are successful and commonly practiced growing methods. But the same things were thought up and the same things were tried ... it is just that most were abandoned by most growers due to not being practical at the time.
The modern mind is really not any more inventive or creative than minds of the past. The main difference is found in what people today have to use, what they have to work with that makes very old ideas that are believed to be new, now practical to do.
While not about growing consider the following as an example of the creativity of the human mind in the past, how inventive it could be many, many years in the past. In 1784 Benjamin Franklin had the idea of paratroopers. Considering that even just manned flight was still pretty far off in the future that was some pretty inventive and creative and advanced thinking.
"Where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defense, so that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not, in many places, do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?" Benjamin Franklin in 1784
In 1784 Benjamin Franklin had the idea of paratroopers. Considering that manned flight was still pretty far off in the future that was some pretty inventive and creative and advanced thinking for the time. All that was lacking was the ability to carry out the thought. Growing has been similar in that just about everything, if not everything, that is allegedly thought up today was actually thought of long ago but either unable to be done or in some cases found to be impractical to do due to limitations of what growers had to work with at the time.
The impractical became practical as equipment advancements were made, and some were still found to be impractical, or at least not successful enough to use them, but what is actually left to be learned will take high educated highly skilled researchers with high tech equipment, not kids in basements and closets etc. who believe they have minds that are more inventive or creative than that of anyone from the past.
Rather than play mad Doctor Ganjastein in their basements while believing they will discover something new they should instead spend their time learning all the things they know little to nothing about that have already been proven to be factual and then put that information to use and make the most of it and as modern research discovers more facts then add them to their base of knowledge and put them into use.