MTTs, Variance, and Secrets of Professional Tounament Poker

I just realized something.  The large-field tournaments on Americas Cardroom (large by post-Black Friday standards at least), even the best ones, don't have very good structures.  That much I already knew.  What I realized is that knowing that must necessarily greatly effect how I play those tournaments, even moreso than I realized.
In his book, Little talks about how long you have before the blinds get too high and you have to start tightening up and being more careful.  For a one-day tournament, live or online, this is usually the first few hours.  But the blinds in fact go up so fast on ACR (the antes start at level 4!), that depending on exactly how fast the structure is, I have an hour or less to play the way Little recommends.  That's it.  The tournament structures on ACR are so bad that it's almost impossible to play optimally.  Wow.

What that means practically is that I can't miss any opportunities, and that I will have to be ruthlessly agressive during the short period when I have the chance to do so.  But I'm still learning how to play optimally, and I'm going to be pushed way beyond my comfort level, plus, loose poker is high-variance to start with.  And that's not the only issue.  Being forced to be so agressive so early, when I'm not really used to it (essentially, learning on the job) is going to increase variance, even more than is already the case in MTTs.

The other thing that I must consider is what this means for my bankroll..  I have to strike a very delicate balance between playing enough MTTs to learn how to play loose poker optimally, while at the same time protecting my bankroll. I expect reaching that comfort level with a new way of playing will take about 100 MTT hours..  If I could work on optimal play during most of the tournament that number would probably about 50, but the way the tournaments are structured, that isn't possible.  There are a  few good touraments on ACR, but they are way above my bankroll, starting at around $30.

The bottom line is that  I can no longer play any MTTs until I grind my bankroll up to at least $200 playing the smaller, mostly one-table tournaments.

It's going to be a long slog.  I sure miss pre-Black Friday poker.