Frustrated spending hours trying to learn combos, what am I doing wrong?

[RonD]

Spent the past couple hours trying to learn some combos for ultimate but immediately felt overwhelmed. There is so many here, how do you remember all of them? Not only that but all the ones I have seen feel like they have almost no application unless the enemy is standing still or at an edge. Not to mention that certain ones are percent exclusive.
Do people really memorize all of these or just certain ones and stick to those? Checked out a couple bread and butter combo videos but can't seem to do any of them in an actual fight and attempting them over and over is super infuriating. I can beat lvl 9s easily enough and can pull off the combos in training, but some of the combos are so fast and precise, how do people pull them off in an actual fight?
I have been playing smash since it came out on 64 and have played it constantly with my son but never bothered to ever look up any information about it, I never even realized there were tilts until ultimate came out. Same with short hops. How do people even do these reliably? I can only get tilts to activate via the c-stick, I can't seem to get them working on the joystick at all; while short hops I can only do by hitting the jump button and attack at the same time since any attempt to tap jump sends me sky high.
Do people fight using only the c-stick? Is that a thing that I should start doing and just use A when I want to jab? Is there a joystick sensitivity to make these easy to pull off? I have always played with tap jump, is my muscle memory causing me problems?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, feel like I went from dancing circles around my buds and the CPUs to being a player with no thumbs.

 

[Nah]

Just take it a day at a time, don't feel like you have to learn everything at once or quickly. It can be a long process, getting better.

Fighting against CPUs and your casual friends is a whole 'nother world compared to getting deeper into Smash and fighting other people who also have taken that dive. It's normal to feel like you were good and then not.

Doing tilt attacks (and aerials) with the c-stick is very common amongst Smash players, make that your main method of doing them, it's a lot better. Turn off tap jump too, it just, as you've already noticed, gets in the way of performing certain actions. Short hopping is something you'll just have to practice though, there's no other way to do it. Would really like to see a short hop button in the future myself.

I'd also recommend not focusing too much on combos at this point. Focusing on combos and tech first is a mistake a lot of people make and something a lot of people unfortunately offer as advice to others. People like combos and tech because they're hype and flashy, but what's always been far more important is stuff like knowing how your character works, learning terms and concepts, what to do in any particular match-up, how to approach neutral, and so on. Give yourself a solid foundation first, then go for the fancier stuff like tech and combos and all that.

That's not to say that they're absolutely worthless at any level of play though, but it'd be better to find and learn practical, easy to execute ones (if your character(s) has/have any), and not like....the stuff that only works well on a training mode dummy or only if you're a genetically enhanced cyborg or something.