DBD Realpolitik: How to become a truly great killer?

"You have to be willing to go to a level that people aren't expecting. So, yes, I violated a corpse to get ten dollar garden shears."

— Rocko the Dog, "Dan and the Garden Shears"

All we ever talk about on the damn forums is what's wrong with everybody and everything else. This perk is too strong, that killer needs to be nerfed, this strategy is necessary because of this part of the meta, ad infinitum.

I think that (for me personally, anyway), it's time to flip that conversation on its head, and instead focus on a question that might be more productive:

What can I do to make myself a better player?

Let's get something out of the way: I am a selfish killer, and I want to win my games. I understand that I can't win every single one, but I could be doing better than I am, and I don't think it's too much to ask that the average game against average players be biased in my favor.

I have 2000+ hours ingame between platforms, and I think I'm about as good as anyone casually playing the game can be. I win some games and lose others. I understand how to mindgame and most of the uses and abuses of game mechanics and how to deal with most of the various builds and strategies that you're going to see outside of very high-level competitive play, but I'm still beholden to the current meta and whatever killer and survivor trends are dictating the current state of the game.

I'm beginning to think, though, that it doesn't have to be this way. I might never be able to get my M1 killer game up to a point where I can consistently go toe-to-toe with the best, but I can become good enough to at least pose a threat to competitive teams and win most of my games against average players.

With the way the MMR cap works, I think it's entirely possible to become a good enough killer to win most of my games. But this might require a lot of creativity, hard work, learning, and strategic thinking.

A few random thoughts in pursuit of this:

1. Habitually playing the game has made me sloppy. My kill rates have been going down recently, and I think a lot of it's just that I've gotten a little bit lazier. I'll try to mindgame pallets that I know on some level I shouldn't try to mindgame, miss hits that I should have gotten because I got too eager, or swung at pallets, windows, or survivors who have DH like I did when I was a baby killer, even when I know better. I'll sometimes lose my discipline and chase a survivor that I know is trying to bait me away from a hook or a gen because I'll want to believe that I can catch them, even though I know damn well that it's a terrible idea. I have to fix this. Seems obvious, but this needs to be a priority.I'm ######### killing myself here.
2. Tying in with the above point, I need to learn and relearn how to do the basics perfectly. Nothing else is going to help me against good survivors if I make a mistake, and I should, conversely, consistently punish survivor mistakes as hard as possible. In some games against the best players, this is the difference between winning and losing (potentially even your only chance if they're gods and the map sucks).
3. It might be worth it to start studying the rudiments of military strategy and seeing how I can apply these. I've started reading The Art of War, and while, yes, that's a pretty common and elementary work on the subject that everyone already knows about, some of its ideas can even be applicable to games like DBD. For example, demoralizing the opponent can be very effective and win games all on its own against weaker teams. If you play mean builds and put the pressure on fast and early, survivors are likely to disconnect or give up on first hook, even if they had a completely fair shot at winning had they refused to be intimidated. At the very least, survivors who are intimidated by a bad early game are likely to give up subconsciously at least somewhat and play at a sub-par level, because even though they're going through the motions, they're expecting to lose and so just don't fight as hard. I'm sure there are lots of these types of things I can learn to exploit if I learn to apply battle concepts to the game.
4. Improve my reaction time. I think that trauma (emotional and physical) has reduced my dexterity some over the past couple of years, and I find myself reacting to things a split-second too late. I'm not sure how to train and retrain my reflexes other than just playing the game a bunch, but I need to figure that out. This is a serious issue.
5. Maybe I need to study higher-level math. I was too mentally ill and ######### up on drugs in high school to really get a good grasp of anything above basic algebra, and even now, I don't remember half of what I did learn, but the few things that I recall actually really come in handy when playing DBD - for example, remembering basic geometry concepts helps me close critical distance and shut down loops faster. Someone here (or was it Reddit?) made a joke about a good Blight player being a trigonometry major, and it really made me wonder how much learning math could benefit me ingame.
6. I need to study better players. I'll catch the occasional Otz video or watch the occasional streamer, but I don't do it enough. And while I don't always agree with everything I see (even Otz isn't right about everything all the time, contrary to popular opinion), I always find myself picking something up or learning something that I didn't actually know before. Time to swallow my pride and accept knowledge from people who might be more experienced than me.
7. There are parts of the game where I still have serious knowledge gaps. I've been playing survivor and suddenly been slapped by Michael's knife across a rail that I didn't know didn't block collision. As a killer, I'll occasionally see a survivor play that I didn't know was possible or learn that a killer I rarely play as or against can do something that I wasn't aware of. I need to read everything, absolutely everything, that has been written about the basics of the game.
8. I need to understand the ins and outs of every map and the game mechanics themselves with surgical precision. How many seconds does it take to close the distance between important points of every map? How many seconds does it take to move between each corner? How many gens can happen in that time, in the best-case and worst-case scenario? How can I estimate these differences by eyeballing the progress of a generator and knowing when to patrol and when to take a chase and what the chances are when I do either?
9. I need to learn to view the game from a survivor's perspective. Decent survivors can pull tricks that, as a killer main (and a mediocre survivor), I wouldn't even have thought of, and competitive-level survivors can loop me to hell and back for three gens before I get a down. I've seen these strategies enough to develop some rudimentary counterplays, but I don't really have an in-depth understanding of them. And if I don't understand survivors, I can't expect to beat them.
10. I need to start taking statistics. Maybe play 100-200 games each with several different builds on a specific killer to see what works best. I've done some more basic tests with much lower sample sizes, and some of the results can be surprising.

Some of these things are things that the average player will never think about and which even most "serious" players are going to find a waste of time just for the sake of getting better at a video game, just by virtue of the fact that, unlike me, they have lives. If I start thinking about these things and mastering them, I can get a competitive edge over those people.

And so can you.

What are your thoughts? How can a DBD player (killer or survivor) learn to take their game to the next level? What can I (or anyone) do to really become a good player?

(Side note: Everybody loves Trailer Park Boys, but Puppets Who Kill is actually the best Canadian comedy. Full episodes are available for free, legally on YouTube and Tubi. I highly recommend.)