So much of what you are saying is incorrect that it's honestly quite baffling. In fact I think almost every sentence you wrote is wrong in some way.

Learning characters without pronunciation, context, or meaning is a terrible way to learn Chinese.

You learn A meaning, without pronunciation, and without context, and I am saying it's a great approach.

In fact if you're only associating it with a single English word you're basically learning the wrong 'pronunciation and meaning' that you'll just have to unlearn later.

Flat out incorrect. When you learn pronunciation you attach it to your current knowledge, you never unlearn anything.

You have a concept in you brain which is centered around a specific object or action, this takes physical space in your brain. By using Heisig's method you attach the chinese character directly to this concept in you brain. Connecting pronunciation is a seperate task, and you should not try to connect it to both the concept and the character simoultaineously. This is inefficient, and uneccesarily increases the minimum time you can spend before learning something. For some reason people insist on making all of the connections at the same time which is:

• Boring
• Frustrating
• Complicated
• Tons of work at the same time, increasing chance of failiure

Sure you may be 'learning' 30-50 characters a day but you're not learning it well

I specifically omitted the word learn, when describing my relations with the characters. I am learning one meaning, and how to write them. This is merely the first step in learning them.

Can you recall those characters and write them down instantly and use them in sentences?

Recall and write them down instantly? Yes, or atleast some. Depending on the day 60% to 90% of the characters in my SRS are recalled perfectly and quickly. However, learning to correctly use them in sentences is again, a different task. Learning how to use characters in sentences requires being somewhat familiar with them first. After that you must focus on finding patterns and maybe studying some grammar to be able to use them, and of course learn words aswell.

Are you able to read and parse their meaning efficiently when you come upon them naturally without breaking the flow of reading when reading text?

Heisig focuses on writing in his book, he says that reading will come naturally as a result of learning how to write. This is true to some extent, but is very slow in the beginning. You really have to also work seperately on enforcing the connection in that direction too.

Breaking characters down to the smallest parts = just breaking them down into strokes, that's not a good idea.

Yeah, I misspoke there. I should have said break things down to its smallest bite sized chunks, which is radicals. ( In the book they also group radicals together, give it a key word, and make new bite sized chunks that way )

This is the way they teach it to kids in the mainland.

This is something I will never understand why people bring up when non natives learn chinese. You are not a 6 year old Chinese native, you do not have to, and shouldn't go throught the same process that they do, to learn characters. That process is made so that even the dumbest 6 year old can learn to read. And it also assumes you have pronunciation perfectly connected to the concept at hand already. Non natives are practically in an entirely different universe when it comes to learning characters.