I made the mistake of thinking that if I knew how to use my gear, it would make me a better photographer. And its the gear that was stopping me from making great works of art. Well, that turned out to be a load of rubbish. I now know how to use my camera, I know the ins and outs of every possible setting for various settings/situations and it still amounts to nada, zippity doodah, a big fat nothing.
I taught myself how to edit using various software, figured out stuff like luminosity masks, and ETTR and signal to noise ratios of various gear, editing skin tones using frequency separation, all kinds of rubbish. Ten thousand filters and many thousands of dollars of gear later, I've come to the conclusion that interesting people make interesting photographs. That's it. There's no big secret here. And right now I'm not all that interesting a photographer. I just have a bunch of interesting gear.
Reading back this sounds like a declaration or something, its not. It's just something I have come to realise about myself and the kind of photographs I want to make. It will be different for different people. But I need to get out there more and well... be interesting I guess.