Okay, I'll play, even though I'm not quite sure where the OP wants to go with all this...
Because I started this practice decades before the internet made it popular, my first years of discovery and development passed in complete isolation from other LD'ers. My initial exposure to the fact that others have LD's -- that anyone else could do this -- didn't come until the early '90's, twenty years after I began my explorations, when I found Laberge's EWOLD in a bookstore.
I don't think "naturally" is quite the right word here, since LD'ing (and Dream Control, if I properly understand your separation of the two, EricinLA) is very much an unnatural event, as it stems from our consciousness defying nature by remaining self-aware in dreams. But I do think that those who cut their LD'ing teeth on their own, especially us old guys who did it before the age of internet forums, have had a clear advantage.
Why? Because we were able to find the best way to become lucid that worked for us, with the primary goal of getting back to a place we visited once or twice accidentally (and I firmly believe that most if not all people have been lucid at least once, especially in childhood, even if they don't remember -- it is an accident of sentience that simply cannot be avoided). We weren't constrained by the current multiple-rule-bound "techniques" so WILDly popular on the forums, we weren't misled by a barrage of misremembered, exaggerated, or just plain specious reports from other dreamers, we weren't lost in the ocean of misinformation clogging the internet, and, above all, we held getting to the dream as the priority, rather than all the unimportant noise, like "SP," (especially SP) that have reached rock star status on these pages.
No, we old farts had the supreme advantage of purity, sans rule or distraction. Only the dream mattered. Sure, if I had an understanding mentor I might have progressed a lot faster 35 years ago, but I think if I had the internet I would very likely have dismissed LD'ing as a waste of time -- I wasn't much of a follower, and techniques would have seemed like the questionable shortcut that, well, they are.
I don't know if that's what you were looking for in your OP, EricinLA, but that's what I got. I hope my words are seen less angry and cynical than cautionary: in other words, newbies ought to do what works for them, make their goals their own, and take what they read on these forums -- especially the grandiose claims, the viability of techniques, and the importance of background noise like HI and SP -- with a grain of salt.
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