There is also this cross trainer that I've been raving about for a week or two:
http://net13.net/Cube/Cross/
There are tutorials that taught me to solve the cross relatively, there are tutorials that taught me to evaluate "good" and "bad" edges in order to multi-task... and then they pretty much left me to my own devices. This has taught me a lot of new ways to deal with cross solutions.
I'll have to give this a go, still struggle with crosses occasionally.
What has helped me recently is watching a couple of walkthroughs on YouTube, where good cubers move good edges up to the U face to protect them. Say there's a couple of edges that are correct relative to each other, but inserting them would break up a 'good' edge.
Also setting up bad edges as good, so that after inserting 3 edges you end up with that edge just a couple of moves off. Sometimes I used to leave that edge till last, or just plan 3 edges and deal with it later, now I realise a quick L/R/whatever at the start could make it just a turn away from solved after the other 3 edges.
I think I now understand 5x5 parity, after about half a dozen solves. With 4 tredges to go I can normally see what kind of case is coming, and try to force a case I know. I use a combination of my 4x4 dedge swap (Uw RUR'U' R'FRF' Uw') and my 4x4 OLL parity alg for true parity cases.
I'm not convinced that learning further cases would significant improve my times, but I'm happy that I can solve the thing without cheating in consistently about 5 minutes. I'm sure my times will plummet fairly quickly, and I'm now at the stage where I enjoy it as a puzzle, rather than being frustrated by lots of edge cases.
I might work on an "intuitive 5x5 last 2 edges" guide for how to reduce the 10 cases simply to parity/non-parity. Pretty sure they can all be solved with a combination of 3 algs (4x4 edge swap, same with Uw+Dw' setup, and 4x4 OLL parity), with a maximum of 2 easy algs plus setup moves per case, I'll have a play...
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