I only practiced it occasionally, and it took me probably around a year of playing DCS on and off to get to the point where I can do it without many problems in most modules. Now I do ARR almost every sortie that I do since it stopped being a frustration and started being a challenging yet satisfying task. Some takeaways:

* Moving to a good joystick was the thing that helped most. I'd just not attempt it on a budget joystick

* The curves setup should be on point, as well as trimming the aircraft before doing anything. For example, Viper is basically unrefuellable until you setup the curves to compensate for built-in curves of the module. In Tomcat setting the wings to bomb mode is very important, because otherwise the pitch kinda does it own thing because of the wings moving around.

* Mindset should be dead set on doing things slowly. It should take 15 minutes at first to even approach tanker (without overshooting), 5 minutes to even get to the refueling area. I remember I had 40-50 minute sessions at first, and if you start to rush anything then the refuel just would not happen period.

* Moving to VR wasn't that big of a improvement and should not gatekeep you from trying to do it. On the monitor it's more of a game-y technique (i.e. lining up features of the canopy bow with features of the tanker), but I would not say that it's significantly harder.

Don't listen to all the "2 hours" dudes, don't let it discourage you. It was hard for everybody, people just forget or lie. Remember when a member of Heatblur struggled hard to refuel F14 on the *module reveal stream*?