I tried to perfect SA Stage 4 Hard this morning. Didn't get it, but something happened that I thought was impossible: I've actually gotten
better at reading Double Black Death Butterfly. I still only capture it rarely (2 or 3 times during today's session), but some aspects of the bullet trajectories are indeed "learnable". That doesn't necessarily mean it's any better of a card, but still.
Then I gave Lunatic a try. Worked my way up to Stage 4 (I didn't feel like spending much time on the Lunatic version yet), spending surprisingly less time on Stage 3 than I thought I would. Of course I used continues. No way I'm 1cc'ing much of SA Lunatic yet.
Anyway, after that, I spent some time to practice Stage 1 Lunatic, and got
this after a lot of grinding (I blame Kisume's sudden difficulty jump for delaying it). My first Lunatic perfect, and only two months after picking up Touhou. Practicing the stage also gave me some insight into why people hate Yamame's opener, though I wonder if that's because they're just not doing it right.