Is there a limit to one's skills?

Yeah, really..get most those Jet jocks out of their planes and give them a Rifle, they cant beat a Sedated Gerbil...

You hit a barrier because that is the way the game is designed. Vehicles farming infantry with one hit and near one hit kill weapons. Lock on weapons dumbing down the game. Vehicle spam. Its all done on purpose to appease the 'skill equalizer' crowd. The surprising large amount of people who don't believe skill should be the dominant factor in a game. They believe that even terrible players should be able to easily defeat elites simply by using cheesy 'skill equalizers' which are nothing more than shallow 'I win' buttons. Often times they are extremely low skill ceiling weapon systems that are extremely strong, meaning almost anyone can kill each other with them (coyote missiles for another example). Then sony wonders why the game has absolutely no competitive scene and outfit pride. In order for those things to exist the game needs to be deeper and the skill ceilings higher.

Heres my take- just play for fun, whatever the natural level you are is what you are and that will come through in the end. The day its not fun any more, stop playing.

I can say this as ive realised as I get older my reaction times are slowing down, so more people will beat me as time goes on and there is nothing i can do (besides drugs) to increase my speed and acuity. Other things can improve over time, to a point as if you are born without good situational awareness, or without a head to analyse weapons well, or any one of a selection of skills needed to do well then its just a case of finding someone to teach you but the core human skills such as hand-eye coordination is something you cant really improve.

NO. STAHP

You have spend hundreds of hours? Some of the pilots you face have well over a thousand in the air alone.

But yea, even if you spend 2k hours flying there is still a chance someone will be better than you.

Regardless of how you are performing, you have probably noticed yourself improving compared to how you used to be. That's all that matters. You should weigh yourself against better players until you have put in as much time as them. If you notice that you stop progressing and still don't stand a chance, then it's time to figure out what the problem is. It's kind of an odd concept these days to play a game and find out that you need to put in hundreds to thousands of hours just to be good, but it's been around forever in fighting games, RTS', and even some shooters(Q3A, UT, ect.).

Yes there is a limit to how good you can get and that is determined by the speed of light and the mechanics behind our hardware and universe.

Some people like to think 'skill' and time played are proportional, this is not true at all it has more to do with who is actively trying to get better and improve ones game; some players who only play a few hundred hours and who are constantly analysing their errors and mistakes will see a higher rate of skill improvement as opposed to those who just play and get better naturally.

Its all relative really you can't say there will always be someone better than you there are too many factors involved in such a statement.

Well in particular flying is not that much about aiming/dodging skill as it is positioning, awareness, and knowing what maneuver to execute when. This all sounds obvious, but consider this:

Researchers did studies on Chess masters and found that their minds work not how you'd think: you'd assume they would look at a situation on a chess board and consider many possible moves. However, they actually only consider a few moves - the best moves. Their minds don't even waste time thinking about possible bad moves.

Is this learned through practice, or is it from talent? Both, obviously, but is it more from one than the other?

My point is, when you are dogfighting, are you spending time thinking about what you should do to react to the enemy pilot? If so, that is the main reason you aren't at the top. On the other hand, if you're not thinking about what you need to do, and acting on instinct, and you lose, that means your instinctive choice is a bad one. Also not an expert.

To be the best, you have to progress from: 1) Instinctive player that makes bad decisions, to 2) Player who thinks about what decision to make, which makes you slow but at least you are now sometimes making good decisions, to 3) Instinctive player that has learned all the good and bad decisions and only makes good decisions.

I don't know if you can get to only making good decisions through pure hard work, but I'm sure you can get to mostly good decisions by working on thinking about what maneuvers work when.

All of this applies to every aspect of the game, but moreso for dogfighting.

The only limit is that which is imposed by our fps.

I hear once you reach 1000 fps, your HUD transcends the screen of your monitor and is imprinted upon your very eyes. At that point, you can see the truth of Vanu, and use that knowledge to lay waste to your enemies in a 420blazeitnoscope haze of mlgswag glory granted by doge itself.

Well, here's a good exemple of why you might think this: This is rguitar's time played with the reaver: 58d 14h

He's currently the best on Watherson. Now, compare your game time. You might be able to see the difference there. Otherwise, just do what you want. I enjoy air fight a lot, but I'm personnaly more of an infantry player. See what you like, and become better at it, or content yourself with your skill level. In the end, this is a game and is all about having fun.

Enjoy!