fnelowet: I'm a relatively new drone pilot, having started in late 2017 with the
P4P+. I only fly for work purposes, not for pleasure.
Our initial filming project took almost three months to complete, so the learning curve of flying a drone and filming with it was relatively intense (albeit cautious). We probably flew on at least fifty days, if not more, of this time period - usually during the golden hours around sunrise and sunset. I then didn't fly the drone again for six months. By then, yes, I had to re-think a few controls before the first flight of the second project - but I'd already accumulated quite a bit of "muscle memory" from before, so it all rapidly came back. Since then, it's been "automatic" to fly again after breaks of several months.
As has been said above, the
P4P+ more or less flies itself. And I almost always have a spotter, so "two brains are better than one" is another relevant factor.
Whatever I do, I do to very high standards. Most people, by contrast, prefer a more casual approach and accept a lower threshold of behaviour. This psychology factor is huge and is still underestimated in most areas of life - even in aviation, despite attention given to "human factors". Despite a lot of public information being available for the past 15 years or so on error-focused learning, the vast majority of people bumble along doing less than their best. Normalisation. Within a tighter professional field, especially where high costs are involved - such as flying military aircraft - the scope for disaster is more clearly defined and policies are taught/implemented so as to minimise things going wrong. Perhaps one of the best examples of minimising unnecessary errors is within F1 pit-stop changes - where fractions of a second can win or lose a race.
It's highly likely that the majority of crashes of drones are caused by pilot error. We're back to psychology. I know of a current Emirates airline pilot who has crashed his DJI drone several times, including once into a swimming pool.....and cutting into his girlfriend's fingers on another occasion. The trouble with people is that they don't want to know what the trouble with them is. Contradictions and hypocrisy are swept under the carpet, minimised or otherwise avoided.