There are plenty of folks who will plan and plan and plan and then execute something, and perhaps the execution will be good enough and that’s it. I’m not one of them. If slicing the group who do that into two categories, there are the gifted, and then there are the conscientious. Again, not personally either of those, and this is just a personal bias, but I think being too much of the latter can pigeonhole you into making in ways that have compromises, because conscientiousness often comes with a lack of creativity, and the idea of planning everything out assumes you will disregard what you learn along the way. Life is not so absolute, of course – you can change plans no matter how good they are.
I posted the process of making a chisel from round bar knowing full well that my ability to grind, file and heat treat is good. To have competence off of the anvil, not so much. But it’s getting better quickly.
There is an evolution of how you feel about things, and in this case, it involves grinding and filing. I love to file things, but there’s not much on chisels that you can bulk file reasonably. The bolster is always filed for me and so is the area around the tang. Files and body floats (believe it or not) are also nice to get everything final before heat treatment, so it’s not like the process is devoid of filing, but removing a cubic inch of material or something with files is out. It’s not on your first chisel, it’s out on your fourth, or whatever. 
that’s what hammering looked like at first. It’s already intolerable just looking at it. The tang is forced to be long and an enormous amount of metal has to be removed. How long ago was that, two weeks? I can’t remember.
Yesterday’s effort looks like this:
Apologies for the blur – it was getting dark and the forge corner of the shop isn’t that well lit and the phone couldn’t grasp it.
After this step now, I cut the chisel off of the bar with a stub of full width bar and then draw that out into a tang. Grinding in below the bolster involves much more material, and that means the chisel won’t be forced to have a garish long tang. The width is uniform and the thickness is relatively uniform.
There’s room for a little more improvement, but the thickness ground off at this point in width and thickness is needed for some decarb. Maybe there is improvement by forming more of the tang before moving on, and maybe even more beyond that, but it’s not apparent to me and forcing it to be instead of just continuing to make things is a pain.
To be honest, I think none of the above chisels came from the first blank picture, but there’s a chisel laying around here that’s had half of the weight ground off from the first blank.
Only the two on the right don’t suffer a bit from long tang disease. Handle looks funny on the middle one, too – it’s just a temporary handle on that chisel, but it does look weird on a chisel design that’s more 1900 in nature than it is octagonal handle.
On the forums, it seems there are few who are there making something similar over and over, and if anything, it may be repetitive discussion about mortise and tenon joints or dovetails. I guess it’s fine to improve those things, but there is something missing if you are wired less like the conscientious folks and you don’t give yourself the room to start making things in some number so you can both figure out how they will look, and how you will make them with relative ease. I’ve always liked making chisels, and forging on the bolster before was nice in the sense that it finally made for a chisel that didn’t need some weird handle design to prevent creeping down the tang. But replacing sawing flat stock and grinding and cutting away a lot with forging is such a welcome change, even if it wouldn’t be necessarily if drawing out and hammering half a dozen of them a day.
What’s the biggest obstacle for hobby making? I still think it is finding something that you want to make well so badly that you’ll continue to make it to the point that you want both aesthetic, fineness and speed improvement at the same time. So much becomes familiar instead of treading lightly. It’s hard to go back to making one one-off unrelated project after another once you can trade some of that “what next, and how, and still stinging from the mistakes I didn’t anticipate” for just walking up to your bench or anvil and considering mostly things you’ve done before, just keeping your eyes open to do it a little better.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 