i mean im having a similar experience, starting late last year all my ratings shot up several hundred, then after january i started having issues improving, imo this improvement rate isnt bad, but i have 2 things to say. 1) Good reason you may have improved very quickly may be because (if you have the same reason as me) you had low amount of play before the rating shoot-up, so improvement outpaced rating gain. 2) its not terrible that you took 5 months to gain 100 rating points, in my opinion the players above 1400 rapid are significantly better than those below it, so initial rating gain becomes really difficult until you have improved sufficiently to be able to beat them. The playstyle after 1400 completely goes from "sac everything and hope its good" to "trade of everything and then use superior endgame memorization to win everyone" so if you are like me and don't memorize endgames, then it becomes harder to improve initially.
in other words, no, you are not slow, its normal. Do expect to not gain rating so quickly after a while though, as you go up rating gain naturally slows.
Thanks for sharing your experience, and yea I do think 1500 is the “buffer zone” between sub 1500 and 1600 brackets, which I mean there’s like a massive skill difference between 1400 and 1600 so…
It’s amazing growth!! Tho u gained rating faster in the beginning, that’s only natural as quality of play increases
Tyty, and yea 1500s grind was insanely difficult…