DC, in all honesty, everyone is different. I've seen some guys who pick up on shooting a stick and do very well out to 20-30 yards in a very short time. Then I've seen guys who've been at it for years and can't hit a Peterbuilt beyond 15 yards.
Where I think so many people go wrong is believing they're supposed to shoot 'instinctive' because it's said that's the way the cavemen/indians/whoever shot. Well, I was taught to shoot indian fashion when I was a tyke, pinching the nock between my thumb and forefinger, drawing back almost to my face and eyeballing down the arrow at what I wanted to shoot. Nothing instinctive about it. I shot that way for a long time - and killed mucho game - before learning about anchor points and stuff.
The idea that the original archers - who survived by getting their meat and fighting off their enemies with the bow - shot instinctive doesn't make sense. When your life is on the line, I doubt you'd want to rely on The Force to make your arrow hit where you want it to. You're going to take careful aim before releasing. Besides that, good arrows were every expensive in terms of time and energy spent. They wouldn't have just jerked the string back and released that arrow willynilly into the ether and hoped for the best. They'd have aimed.
The arrow is right there in your field of vision. You might as well use it as an aiming reference. I'm positive our ancestors were smart enough to figure that out.
The aiming method I use is the split vision gap shooting style used by Howard Hill. Byron Ferguson explains it in his book "Become the Arrow" far better than Hill did. When you learn the gap system and use it enough to become confident, you eventually quit thinking about the gap. Your brain figures the distance and gap automatically. In other words, with time and experience the gap becomes more or less 'instinctive.'
For beginners, they can pick a gap at a given distance, see where the arrow strikes in relation to their aim point, then adjust their gap to put them on target. With instinctive, there is no way for them to make adjustment because they don't know where they were aiming to begin with. It takes a lot of trial and error - mostly error - to learn to shoot instinctive. A beginner using an aiming method will become a better shooter, faster, than another who's blundering about with instinctive shooting, stubbornly clinging to a false premise.
By the way, this method works even better with compounds than it does with stickbows. The letoff lets you really take your time and focus your concentration on your target. No sights to worry about. No peeps to dim your low light vision. No megabucks optical alignment devices. I like the feeling of freedom I get without the additonal hardware. Almost as good as shooting a stickbow.
