Going back to the original post for a moment.
"When does it all click?"
You say that you're having to focus on thinking about everything all the time (my words, not yours). That's a good thing.
The best advice I ever heard, I got on the day I passed my PPL, from a retired airline captain. He said "Congratulations! Now you have a license to kill yourself."
It took me a minute to realise what he'd said, because everyone was congratulating me. But when I asked him what he meant, he said something to the effect of:
When you get your license or any additional ratings or certificates, you're at your peak of knowledge and ability, after that you slowly start to degrade in your knowledge and ability. Many pilots can't pass the PPL exam a year after passing it. You need to continue training, on a regular basis, and continue learning, in order to maintain a level of knowledge and ability that is close to where you are now. If you don't continue to train and learn, your skills will degrade until one day, when you think you're as good as you are now, but you're not, and you'll do something that you could do now, but can't do then, and you will die. I only hope you don't take someone else with you.
But, if you continue to train, learn, study, work hard on thinking while your in the plane, never get complacent, work on your skills, you can fly for a long long time and never have an incident.
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Through the years I've seen young pilots who think they've "got it" who then get complacent, and their skills do deteriorate.
My advice to you, is this, the minute you think you've "got it" and know what you're doing, go and get some training and make sure you do "have it". I bet you'll find that there are some simple little things that you've forgotten, or have stopped doing.
Keep flying, enjoy it, but keep working hard in the cockpit, keep thinking ahead of the plane. Eventually you'll be thinking further ahead than you are now, but never accept your performance as "good enough". There's always room for improvement.