It's hard to say because everyone is different. Virtually every method seems to have cases of working almost instantly for some but being totally worthless for others.
After spending years practicing lucid dreaming, my DILD rate has generally improved over time. And yet, to be completely honest, I still don't really know what exactly makes it tick. It seems that there are quite a number of factors which all contribute to whether a DILD occurs, and they are very difficult to clearly identify. Self-awareness practice during the day, regular thinking and musing about lucid dreaming, motivation and excitement, MILD-type exercises or LD-related mantras during the night while falling asleep, the condition of my sleep and circadian rhythm, and current amount of stress in my daily life are just a few things that seem to influence it. As to the relative weight of each one: I still have no idea.
Also, I don't know of many (if any) cases where DILD is totally consistent all the time. One can certainly get into a good round of practice and lucid mindset and have LDs pretty regularly, but there's almost always going to be some degree of luck (or what appears to be luck, at least, given how little we understand) involved for many of us.
So far, it appears you've had some success with MILD, if just a little, so you might just continue with it. Better yet, maybe combine it with the self-awareness practice you're currently doing. It doesn't hurt to try a few things in parallel. A lot of times they work together and produce a better effect than doing just one at a time.
Also, regarding the self-awareness development: In my experience, this seems to be something you have to stick with regularly and develop for quite a long time (possibly even a few years or even longer) for it to really take off. But this is pretty much no different from lucid dreaming skill development itself in most cases, so you might as well. Even then, it might be hard to notice anything happening until you look back on old diary or dream journal entries and realize how different you actually were back then. That's what I've started to experience. The changes are so gradual, it's a bit like growing up where you don't realize how tall you've gotten until one day when you just happen to look back at a record from several years ago. I think the effort is worth it, though: Not only has it been helpful for LDing, I'm starting to feel like it's been improving my waking-life personality as well over the last couple of years I've been working with it. I'm certainly not perfect and still have many big issues, but looking back I'm starting to see that there has been at least some noticeable improvement.
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