I used to be the Heart player and now I'm a Body player surrounded by Heart players who say things like "Training mode isn't useful for improving the consistency of your inputs" 
@amy I remember practicing shield drops in Brawl (which were the last game they were possible) and I made a custom stage full of droppable platforms and I would grind it until I could shield drop 14 times in a row quickly
And then I would go into friendlies with aesc and I couldn't shield drop at all
I realized later that, in the custom stage, I unconsciously placed my left thumb on the control stick in a way I don't normally to make the input easier, so I was practicing a situation that I never put myself in actual matches
@The_T @amy these days I use training mode to test very specific things briefly and make sure most of my practice occurs against AI or friendlies with aesc.
Like, I do know that a frame perfect Nair will true combo into FJK on Marth at exactly 24% so if my Nairs have been sloppy I will hop in training mode for a minute and land a few frame perfect Nairs just to get the timing down again
But yeah extensive time in training mode is usually time wasted for me
@wallhackio @amy it also helps that "being good enough at the game to win" is rarely ever my goal, my goal is "to make cool shit happen in the game" and I sure can't do that if I'm flubbing inputs
@wallhackio @amy I definitely have this problem in regular fighting games, where I think I'm probably better off labbing against AI than in training mode. Like training mode is literally just for testing "how do I even make this move come out. How the fuck do 360s work in this game."