Mostly, yes, but we'll see how I fare in El Salvador in Nov compared to last year.

Duolingo obv aims for practice and repitition instead of direct instruction (e.g. conjugate -ir verbs in the past tense by doing blah).

My engineer's brain would prefer to know those rules (to the extent that they exist and aren't a mess of exceptions), so it feels like a bit of a learning style mismatch. But I believe them when they say they've leveraged the experience of teaching millions of people. The way I think I want to learn might not be the best way for me to learn.