Personally I do not completly understand the question. Well, I do understand part of it - I mean - hard work.
What I do not exaclty understand is - talent.
What is talent here? Some physical or mental conditions? Or maybe something else?
As they say it in yoga, there are multple ways to get enlightment (or in our case high-level skills):
1. By birth (maybe an equivalent of talent)
2. By hard and correct practice of yoga (in our case iliqchuan).
3. Taking some drugs (I do not know if there are any to get high skills in Iliq
).
4. something else that I do not remember. Maybe by a mercy of guru or something like this.
And each person can get to the end result by what works for him.
However, as I (with my VERY limited experience in ILiqChuan) feel it, you missed one very important item in your original question - attention.
As I see it, a person with high level of attention/consciousness will need less time to get to higher levels of skills. Some people are gifted by nature with high level of consciousness (talent). As a result they practice little, but get a lot.
A person with low levels of consciousness can spend dozens of years of hard work and get little result.
However, maybe he could spend some time and effort to improve his consciousness, and slightly shift his emphasis on the training – to do the work in such a way that he really feels something, instead of simply doing exercises. I guess it would dramatically shorten the time needed for this person to master the skills.
At least it’s might point of view now, being quite a novice here.