Hacker Envy

I've been lurking on ROM hacking forums for years and had this account for over a year, but despite poring over disassemblies and making tiny modifcations to code, I feel like I'm really going nowhere at times. Even when I do have a measure of success, it takes me eight hours just to produce a few bytes of code that do NOT crash the game.

At the same time, I've seen people who are complete newbies to hacking and programming, but figure out the basics like the C2 bank of which I'm still trying to figure out one tiny piece. What bothers me is that the more I study, the more I realize that the task I am trying to accomplish is intermediate at worst, and the only reason why I keep hacking at it (pun fully intended) is because as far as I know, no one else has done it, but even a newbie could probably do it in a few hours.

To be fair, I do know more now than when I first tried to mess with the code, but I won't lie. I get jealous of everyone else making leaps and bounds when I can't even understand the difference between a register and a direct page. Sometimes I feel I'll never accomplish even my own personal goal hacking-wise in my lifetime and what bothers me is unlike my other pie-in-the-sky goals, I know this is in reach.