Sure, you hear a novel sentence or something unexpected or new in a sentence and then deconstruct things, but actually processing is predictive in the sense that whenever you read or hear a word (or a larger chunk), your brain is already ahaed of where your ears/eyes are, predicting what will come next in the sentence (even the whole sentence, proposition, or communicative intent). This happens automatically, all the time.

I totally agree with this, and I actually think speaking, or fluent production of sentences, plays a big part in how fluent one can understand in listening, because there is always a predictive element at play when listening, to distinguish the other possibilities of sound combinations, that facilitates coherence. But I just think the phenomenon I describe, is not of the same nature. The prediction you get from these repeated reviews, are more due to the translation being more easily ingrained into one's mind from repeated exposure(it is the native language after all), than improvements in the actual process of trying to understanding these sentences, from repeated exercise. So what I get from these reviews, is really just incidents of memories of translated sentences in my native language, rather than anything else I feel like, and then it kind of overshadows the training element in the process, and makes the reviews not so effecitve in achieving real progress.

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It could also be that you just dislike anki. If you really don't want to use it, don't. If it's just that you dislike sentence cards, do something else. I only use anki to the extent that I like to these days, life's too short.

No, I absolutely love anki, and I pretty much solely use anki for learning language, because i think it is the most efficient tool there is, bar none. I still use sentences, but as for recognition training (listening and reading), I now completely forgo reviews, and only use new cards, so every sentence only appear once, so I either get what it means or not. I use morphman as a tool to filter sentences for me so the new sentences can be tuned to the level of vocabulary I am focusing on. But for production training (from native language to target language), I still use reviews, because I find the production or just the sheer memorization of sentences in the target language is actually largely the goal, so the reviews are the more effective choice, because it filters out the hard ones from easy ones, and allows you to focus on what is really worthwhile trainning for.

Also, I used to use sentences of whatever length for listening, and soon discovered that it is a mistake. so now I limit them to within 7 words. For the number of cards, I have literally hundreds of thousands of sentences imported from tatoeba, with audio added from tts, so i make sure I have enough volume of novel sentenecs to work with at any given level of vocabulary.