You could read my dissertation if I could be bothered to go into the attic and find it.
It just turned out that measuring 16 year olds range of vocabulary correlated very strongly (0.91 from memory) with the ease, speed and grade at which they passed a course to go First Solo on a Grob 109b motor glider. Same for verbal reasoning but very slightly less strong correlation. Ditto for spelling ability.
Obviously the language skills are not directly useful in what is a process and motor skill based program of learning. They are a merely a proxy for the undefinable 'pilot aptitude' when it comes to 16 year olds and going solo in a motor glider. Why being good at crosswords at 16 means you are good at learning to fly is a puzzle to which there is no answer.
Anyway - epic thread creep.
I can fully understand people regretting starting pilot training. Seen it many times before. Even if you can afford to keep your rating current you'll be as rusty as an old Cortina in a year and after a couple of years your CV will look like one big training risk.
Once you finish flying training you're a newly baked cake. You go stale just the same. And there are fresh cakes coming out of the oven every other week.
Not nice, is it?