Learning as the focus of long-term interest in a game?

So the other day I went through another round of the old discussion among FPS players comparing Counter-Strike type, semi-realistic games, with the "cleaner" style of Quake and other standard deathmatch games.

I think I hit on something new, though, when I tried to make a comparison of what is currently happening on the competitive level in FPS games with what is happening with In the Groove. (the "new" take on Dance Dance Revolution - identical gameplay, but offering much larger challenges) The main thing I focused on, at first, was the community; why does it seem like so many CS players are frustrated, or if not that, egotistical? This is typically shooed away as being an effect of the community's size, but it's not hard to find examples of smaller multiplayer games where people are jerks too. I decided instead to focus on the game *itself* provoking these reactions, but in a way that wasn't immediately obvious.

A point which has been discussed many times before is that skill differences are the primary factor causing frustration - it's disheartening to play your best and still lose. But something more than just the immediate difference had to be the reason for this, because most people can soak up a few losses. This is where I came up with something new - remember all those stories people tell(you might have one of your own) where the protagonists are kids and one of the kids happens to be far better at a game than the others, and the others try hard but can never figure out how to achieve that level of play, and eventually get pissed and give up? I think that's what's going on with modern FPS games, just on a much larger scale.

Attempts at realism and gameplay balance have made it extremely hard to know and develop your own abilities at these games, yet clear differences between the "amateur" and "pro" player remain. It is this "hidden" exclusivity of learning, I think, that makes the community so distorted. In the more traditional deathmatches, differences of skill are very clear and easy to understand; but people eventually reach their innate reflex and aiming abilities, see that improving is going to be very hard, and that's probably as long as their interest lasts. The random factors of the semi-realistic game play with this process and cause people to start doubting things other than themselves - so they keep playing, but what everyone is doing is waiting for probability to make their "killer round" come around, rather than actually advancing their skill. It's gambling.

I'm pretty confident that the learning process is the key in this, because it accounts for why DDR and ITG have such devoted fans; the game is very, very simple to understand initially, and each new difficulty grade is only slightly but tangibly harder than the last. The path to advancement is made almost perfectly clear, all the way to the highest levels of play. As a result, most players have aspirations to reach those levels, the game remains both fun and addicting in the long-term, and there's very little complaint from any players about anything.

As a general concept it seems to apply everywhere I can think of; RPGs, for example, usually replace real learning with statistical advancement, which introduces the caveats of grind and time/money as a replacement for skill, but also makes them accessable to almost everyone, with skill only becoming a factor when level limits are introduced - thus it's no surprise that most people end up hating level caps.

Any thoughts? I'd like to see what might be wrong with my thinking here...