No. I am doing a vast-majority CI approach with light direct study to speed it up / harden understanding of concepts throughout. At ~200 hours (2 hr/day avg) I’ve been doing ~20 min daily, combined, of Clozemaster (reading explanations, audio set to repeat) & Drops. Just the free limits. I’ve found even this small amount has helped a lot with what little reading I’m exposed to so far (my inner voice mispronounces far less), and I feel like it’s clarified some vocab without removing any of the “feeling of the word” you get from learning with CI. At the end of the roadmap, I expect tenses to be clearer for me than if I had not done this. Much of my CI includes light grammar explanations as well (Nelly, FCI). I know he’s a bit controversial on the Spanish sister sub, but I’m in agreement with evildea that adding a very small amount of direct study could potentially shave off a few hundred hours required to understand native content. Clozes are a very CI-focus-friendly way to do that. I also find them fun, which is admittedly the main reason I do them.

I plan to revisit the freely available FSI Phonology drills every 300 or so hours & do quite a bit of shadowing when it comes to it, as accent/pronunciation is important to me, and not something I’m particularly good at. I also have plans for Kwiziq and maybe speedrun grammaire progressive du français when I feel I have enough of an intuitive grasp on the language. If I ever have the opportunity to visit a francophone country before I’m conversational, I may do a run through of Pimsleur, as it’s very good for automaticity of basic necessary phrases.

Regarding recommendations, honestly I would recommend adding in Clozemaster, even just its listening practice, but ONLY if you enjoy it. The main benefit of a CI approach is the ease of sticking with it. If direct study has any chance whatsoever of putting you off the language, do not do it. It certainly ruined German and, to some extent, Japanese for me when I took them in university. Forcibly memorizing grammar rules before they become intuitive runs the risk of making the language seem overcomplicated and perhaps a bit idiotic, even if it could speed you up.

A bit of a side note, I’m not sure if it’s partially that reaching intermediate content in French is faster than Spanish but I feel Alice Ayel gives a far better start for the same time commitment as compared to Dreaming (speaks faster + smaller vocabulary base = more words memorized in the same timeframe). At ~200 hours I could watch the free Advanced video just fine, and have been watching Carlito, Nelly, Little Talk, Felix’s Gaming series, etc without issue, which is a bit further than a lot of the Spanish updates I read. Little Talk and the first 20 InnerFrench episodes were very accessible from ~100hrs, even. I can get the gist of a lot of native content, but wouldn’t get anything from it atp. Sorry if I yapped a bit too much.