While watching an acrobat show, I came to the realization that there is probably a better way to develop skills.
These acrobats were realizing dangerous performances, where mistakes must not happen even when doing the show thousands of times. And also it must have been possible to practice it right on the first time.
My answer to that is imagination, search for the proper mindset, and switching to it.
You have to try to imagine the thinking of someone who can do things naturally.
It's kinda like in "the pretender" TV-show. It's one layer of indirection added to the more traditional "imitate the master" practicing technique.
Some tasks are best handled when you have a specific internal representation.
Often when you start from scratch, you don't have the right one, and through experience, blood and sweat, you refine it until you discover the representation that works well for the task.
But when you have a representation that kind of work but is missing something, you get stuck in plateau which practice (both "scrimmage" and "drill") only reinforce.
For example, with our acrobats, are they visualizing the actions in their head they are about to do ? Do they see themselves in 3D as a first person character, or in third player view ? Are they feeling the movements in their head ? Can they do the movements without doing them ? Can they create mental variations of the movements ? How do they handle the motion blur that our novice eye experience ? How do they evaluate the risks ?
Acrobats often are born into; and people do things without knowing exactly how they do them. So you'll have to practice observation to understand (how, why, when,...) they do what they do.
While practice is still necessary, it becomes a mere reality check for the performances you have mentally imagined doing a thousand times.