Like I said in another post in this thread, I don't think it's at all a given that if you socialize enough, you will eventually develop good social skills, and I think that reading a bit of stuff on the subject in the last month helped me about as much as all the social experiences I've had in the last year.

Sure, but it should be ~30 minutes of reading a day and ~4 hours of interaction a day. Practice is what leads to skill development, and unpleasantly enough, only hard practice (i.e. focusing on the parts you're bad at, not the parts you're good at) really counts.