Nice thread. I have done Antique Dragon as well - very fun model, but extremely hard to get it right. No wonder that you had problems with completing it, even if you are advanced in origami and have completed a lot of different arts, to really get it right, you have to do it at least once. After that everything gets easier. As for my top 5:

1) Gryphon by Kade Chan, done about a year ago and by far definitely the one, that I had to spend the biggest amount of time on. Very satisfying effect though.

2) 3D Peacock with Fanned Tail - isn't that hard once you actually understand how dimensional origami works, but as I still didn't have enough practice with 3D, it was extremely hard for me to get it done.

3) Bull - seemed fairly easy at the beginning, but definitely gave me a hell. I'm looking forward to do it again though as it was extremely fun and quite unusual in its own way.

4) Antique Dragon - as I said already, quite hard, but very satisfying effect. The instructions included in the book are great though and frankly even though it's probably harder than some of those I have listed above, perfectly written instructions made it much easier

5) Complex Bear - I already had a couple of Bears done before, much easier one though and I frankly thought, that this one will go much smoother for me.

I know exactly what you mean with being good at something. Honestly, whatever I have done in my life, I always wanted to be good at it. You may call it an ambiiton, sure, it probably has to do with that a little bit, but I believe that actually everyone wants to be good at something and feel good about themselves thanks to that. Just not everyone realizes that and/or have no desire to change that. It's not an easy thing to focus on something entirely in your spare time, even if it's a hobby and if you want to be really good at it, you have to enjoy doing than, then it's still pretty tiring and requires a lot of effort to learn. Whether you pick sports, soccer for example and you want to be good at it, at least better than most people you play with in non-professional neighborhood leagues, you will have to put tons of practice and effort to be good at it.

Sure, you may love playing soccer, but that doesn't change the fact, that you still have to really do your best every time you play, if you want to get on a pretty good level. And the training part, as well as it may sure fun and after all it's the activity you chose to spend your spare time on, it can also be very tiresome and frustrating. That's why I believe taking something easy and just doing it whenever you find it suitable is a much better approach than typical hard-trying with dreams of getting good. You may very easily end up disappointed in your lack of effects or poor progress, and totally abandon the niche. But then again, it seems like it's not really possible in your cause, because you have already made up your mind. You already know, that you do this because a) you like and b) you have the motivation to finally become at something. It may not be an ambition, but you are surely one of those people that take life pretty serious and want to improve themselves as well as increase their life-quality in general, so telling you to take a light approach won't work anyway.

So, my suggestion is to simply do your best. Keep trying, keep fighting, even when your favorite hobby seems hard, keep thinking of new solutions, new patterns and new ways to create something. That is if you really have the desire to become good at something

Well, those are good looking tuts, but I frankly expected to see a little bit more :P Well, I know it takes quite some to write those up, even without videos or photos, but as for a tutorial thread I hoped to see at least 10 or 15 different origami tutorials. If you have some time, would be great if you could expand your collection, or actually, I could make some in spare time. Not sure when I will be able to have enough time to prepare anything like this - especially, as I would love to include some pictures as well - video might be too for me, I actually never made a video before, so I think sticking just to photos should be enough, and well, it will also be much easier for people to create their own origamis.

Yes, I know there is tons of pictures and videos already and I could just write a simple text like you did, but I believe it would be much easier with pictures, especially as you could simply start creating your origami following a certain tutorial step-by-step. I believe watching a video or even checking up photos on other websites and following text-only instructions is too much of a distraction cause as it was already said here - it's an art, and as it is always with art, everyone has a different way to create something, is following different patterns and so on, so it's pretty hard to follow two other people doing the same thing, but very differently and expect good results.

Anyway, I'm not here to critique your methods, I believe you did a pretty good job with writing those and I'm sure they will be of assistance for many people, but they just simply don't look complete, if you ask me.