progress
Well, I'm no longer awful at 2H. I was averaging 22 then, and now I'm around 17. For now, my best 1/5/12 are 11.92/15.09/15.67. This is at the cost of my OH, in which I'm slower now. Ah, well.
Although this is a pretty blatant bump, I thought that people might be interested in what I learned.
DO NOT JUST PRACTICE - I suppose the generic label encompasses everything, but seriously don't just keep on solving and hope for improvement. One might simply resort to old and bad habits, forget new techniques, and not observe weaknesses when simply trying to beat the timer. At least, that's what happened to me.
Practice slow, then practice really freaking fast, then put them together - The advice to practice solving F2L slowly is tried and true. However, slow practice only took me so far, and I had so much "slow" practice for looking ahead and turn efficiency. Practicing solving quickly forced me to look ahead on a quick-turning cube, and that was what I really needed. During actual solves, trying to go moderately fast gets me the best times.
Track edge orientation during F2L - I try to as many insert pairs with all 2gen algs as I can before doing a y/y' rotation. It's also good for looking ahead. I actually tried a pseudo-Roux method where I would orient the 8 non-U edges form the cross, then solve F2L with no F/B/y. Fun exercise for preinspection, albeit impractical.
Memorize the orientation that will result after cross - went well in conjunction with the above.
Have a system for PLL recognition - for example, in my set of algs (the first post is slightly outdated), the Gs and T start with the headlights on the left, the Js and F start with the bar on the left.
Get a good cube - a GuHong with CRC helped me pick up a new ubiquitous finger trick (UR'U with index, wrist, pinky) and enabled ambidextrous F2L.
Study details - I learned that certain regrips are much faster than others;
that even though we all love RUR', RU'R' for insertions, R'U'R, R'UR are faster (which makes Sune and the 8-move T OLL faster backwards);
that working on B is better for lookahead than working on F (again, 8-move T);
that fancy f2l tricks (like R2uR2u'R2) are a bad idea because they ruin tempo;
that xU2LU2L'x' is better than y'RU'R2UR for some insertions;
and that picking algs for combatibility with each other in terms of recognition over speed is actually a valid strategy (see above).
Also, M'URU'r'U2R2B'R'BR' was a nice OLL.
Cheers, all.