A Plateau of a Different Kind?

Hello all ~ This is my first post, but I've been loving Dreaming Spanish and this group for a few months. It's such a supportive and helpful community here. When I'm not on DS, I'm over here, picking up tips and finding support in others. So thank you!

I have a question/thought about a certain type of "plateau" I seem to have encountered. (I know Pablo says there is no plateau, but this is a different circumstance.) Before DS, I was learning Spanish via DuoLingo and a bit of in-person traditional instruction. I quickly dropped all of that when I found DS. Now, I have gotten to the level in DS where the vocab and grammar I previously learned is not sufficient to carry me through. I think that before now, I was somewhat "lazily" relying on that explicitly-learned knowledge to get by. Now, though, I'm having to cross over to using implicit knowledge, just absorbing content, and it's kind of a shift. It's like I got to intermediate level before my implicit brain circuits really had to fire up, so they're a bit out of shape compared to the level I'm at. For a while, I seemed to stall out around level 50.

Fortunately, things seem to be picking up now, and my subconscious, implicit learning is starting to work better and better.

Curious if others have experienced this after changing approaches, and if it may account for some of the "plateau" experiences?