My experience has been similar, and I'll also add on a related note that probably one big reason why I'm not better at casual conversation is that if I'm not genuinely curious about the answer to a question I'm asking, I often won't have anything interesting to say as a followup to whatever answer I get (e.g. maybe I'll ask "So, where are you from?" or "What school do you go to?", and they'll answer, and then I'll say, "...Ah, um, okay" and not have anything else to say). It seems to me that a lot of advice on conversation (of the type prepared for people with Asperger's syndrome, or social anxiety, or general awkwardness) teaches mostly superficial aspects of conversation, and I suspect that there's a deeper art to it that can't be conveyed so easily. Probably the best way to develop such a sense is to be the sort of person who is naturally actually curious about other people, but for those of us to whom social curiosity doesn't come so naturally, learning to fake it well probably requires a much deeper understanding than can be attained by memorizing standard small-talk questions and such. I expect it's possible to learn to successfully simulate social curiosity, but not if one only understands it at that superficial level.