A moment.

Took a little time at lunch today to try approaching fingerstyle scales using the "two-finger" method I've read about.  In a nutshell, the logic seems to be "devote two fingers to the scale run on any given string", starting with i-m, but could also be m-i, i-a, a-i, m-a, or a-m.  There's actually a lot more variation in that than might be immediately obvious, and one can get a little intimidated by the "what to use when?" question.  I suspect the logic here is that when playing a run your goal is to reduce the possibles (also at that point it becomes like the up- and downstrokes of plectrum playing);  what I'm less sure about is when and if three fingers becomes a preferred option--is this at all tied in somehow to the idea that most string intervals are a fourth or less, and therefore you'd never need more than three notes per string?

I will definitely need some more work with the "descending" patterns of the RH fingers (so:  the a-m, the a-i, and the m-i), but I can see where they might come in handy.

After focusing on this for a few minutes, I let it vary a little bit, and started improvising on the CCDGAD guitar I happened to pick up.  Not five minutes into this, a moment happened.

I was playing mostly out of a G natural minor scale over the third and first strings, and observing my right hand, I started to see the third finger enter the mix, naturally and spontaneously.  That is, sometimes I'd be using two fingers, quite naturally over the two separated strings, and other times that third finger would just show up when it was needed, and not necessarily just for rhythmic changes.  It would then drop out for a bit and then re-engage as "necessary".

! ! !

I can't speak for anyone else, but moments like that can pump me for weeks or more.

Playing devil's advocate, I shifted gears a bit, and started to try moving back-and-forth between playing "out of the chord" with three fingers, and playing these scale runs with two (all while keeping my idle thumb as relaxed as possible).  Okay, I don't have a lot of history or facility with this yet, but it sure felt logical.

And the same thing happened.

This is fascinating.  It reminded me of something Tony Geballe once told me, when we were discussing playing without looking at your hands.  "You know where you want your hands to go, so just put them there."  Maybe that's what's happening here.  I do know what I want to hear, and where the notes are, so maybe at some level I'm just enlisting the attention of my fingers subconsciously.  That would make me very, very happy.

The irony is that this will probably impel me to do more drills, not less.  I'm not one of those who thinks that technique will somehow limit the creative impulse;  rather, the more I can learn the more I can get my conscious brain out of the way, so that I can play what the muse wants without having to think about it.  It frees me up to listen.  :-)