Imagine if Darth Vader had created the rebel alliance in order to funnel potential opponents into a harmless straw-opposition: he could let them attempt the occasional coup, always avoiding any real cost to himself and throw them the occasional minor victory to keep them on the hook.
According to the (admittedly non-canon) game The Force Unleashed, this is the original source of the Rebellion.
I'd like to thank you for articulating something that now seems obvious to me, but was in fact at variance with both my beliefs and what I believed I believed.
It also describes failures I've had to improve my own skillsets accurately. As an example, I had tried to learn guitar for some time.
While doing so, my internal mental dialogue while learning was 'I just need to get through this fifteen minutes of practice', as opposed to 'Ah, so that's how I play a G chord.'. I abandoned the attempt as I learned very slowly, and decided I simply had no natural talent for the area, as my learning speed was significantly slower there compared to friends of mine who were spending comparable amounts of time for vastly superior results.