I think the way you ended your post is, ultimately, the real answer. At the end of the day, there’s no substitute for those 10,000 hours, so patience and practice, as you say, are the only real way to get good at controlling the form. Having said that, there are some go-to tools and approaches. As I’m sure you’ve learned already, a lot of people like working with Dynamesh enabled while working the basic form, and then Zremeshing once the basic shape is in place. That approach lets you get messy while you’re still experimenting, while still ending up with some pretty darn clean topology. I actually find myself using zremesh a number of times throughout the process. When things go too far south topologically, its like a reset button, in a way. Beyond that its hard for me to be more specific because the nature of the clean up depends on the nature of the sculpt and what you mean exactly by clean up. If by clean up you mean cleaning up edges and plains, then brushes like Hpolish are great. Also the polish (or is it smooth - sorry, I’m not in front of my zbrush at the moment) options in the deformation palette can help clean things up, but often at the cost of finer detail - which is another reason why you’ll want to clean up your form BEFORE getting too detailed. Another popular technique is using the Layer system to, well - layer your details on. What that means is that the artist will create the primary shape, and then create secondary detail in a new layer, and finer detail still in another layer, and so on.
I don’t know if any of the above helps. If you’d like any additional clarification, write back.
Good luck, and practice, practice, practice ('till your Wacom bleeds)
