[jbob2000]

The biggest gain for me came from using a split keyboard. I had some bad habits where my dominant hand was crossing the keyboard to hit keys that my non-dominant one should have been hitting, and this was impacting my speed. By using a split keyboard, it forced my hands in to the correct posture and didn't allow one hand to dominate because the other side of the keyboard was too far away.

I was tracking my progress on typera.net, which is quite dated, but seems to have a nice balance of challenging words and phrases.

[SuperPaintMan]

I've been going over this thread wanting to comment on damn near everything, I think I'll make a blog post.

In short, you nailed it. But forgot to mention abusing the power that QMK gives you for reducing reach/key stretch.