Hi GreenBoat
I can answer some of your questions from my point of view and what I hope to achieve:
There is no doubt that trading a bit like gambling and there is a lot of randomness involved. The aim of building a strategy is to interpret the data and remove a bit of the randomness and make a better call than the next guy, then you are able to make money. Remember that trading is literally buying and selling whether it is gold, shares or a currency. If nobody sells at a certain price you won't be able to buy.

To answer your 'working hard at it' question: I suspect / hope that you are right. The more you are analyzing data, looking at it, the more experience you will build up and the better your judgements should get. I think the trick is that you will need a bit of luck and some analytical skill / talent to make sense out of the information. Remember that there are some external influences such as political, economical , etc influences as well.

Personally I am looking at creating the strategy as a challenge. I have done a lot of programming in the past and I don't really enjoy that part but I really enjoy analyzing data to see what is hiding in it. Hence I am looking at an environment where I do not have to write thousands of lines of code but rather focus on the strategy. MT4 for example requires me to write huge amounts of very technical code in order to analyze the data. In Zorro (or in R) a lot of that is done already and I can just use these routines like a set of tools. (I hope that I am right here otherwise I need to find another environment. )