I started in January doing 12 per day, which is pretty tame compared to what others are doing but I think it's the right pace for me.

Coincidently I started a job that involved air travel, so I am frequently walking through Minneapolis-St Paul airport where the signs have kanji and hiragana on them.

At first, I didn't recognize any of the kanji. The 'restroom' sign had hiragana on it, and I recognized that, but the kanji were unknown to me.

Fast forward to last Monday, and I now recognize all the kanji on the 'baggage claim' sign.

It's those small victories along the way that make the process fun. One might say I've wasted a bunch of time waiting for Heisig to (finally) introduce them. (If I really wanted to know what was on the baggage claim sign I could have looked it up and added it to my vocab.)

But in the long run I think it will be very powerful to have at least seen (and possibly memorized) all these kanji as* a base of knowledge.

*Edit: wrote 'has' instead of 'as'

As a non-Heisiger, I have never "learned a kanji". I learn words (with their kanji, of course) in the course of encountering them in Japanese-subtitled anime, games etc (I haven't used vocab-lists since very early on).

And the kanji kind of become friends by meeting them again and again in different places. I learn 道草 and re-meet 草. I say "Hello 草さん！Didn't I see you in 草原 last week? You were going under a different name then*, weren't you, y'ol' rascal you."

But absolutely, meeting them "in the wild" (including games etc) is a very important way of retaining them, I believe.
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*It can be pronounced くさはら, but I think そうげん is most usual.