I think everyone learns differently and there are many different methods to play. And maybe you are already a better player than I am.
I have been playing probably around 12 years now -I went to a few bluegrass camps had a Homespun learn to play mandolin DVD learned some fiddle tunes and have been playing in a very amature band for all that time.
So I could play chords and work out a meager break.
You would think that after 12 years of that one might start getting pretty good but no I kind of got stuck and never progressed much. Part of that is that I could go weeks without playing much and also had a carpal tunnel issue that made it hard to play long and which I finally got fixed last January.
So after I recovered from that surgery I decided that I really needed to make the effort to learn to play all over the neck and not just the first 6 frets and or some particular break higher up. In other words to be able to move all around the neck forwards backwards up down diagonally skipping spaces or whatever without losing my place always staying in key. It took me a few months to get pretty good at that just playing the major scale to bluegrass songs. I bought every Gibson brothers album so had about 162 songs to play against. I started off with a subset of the slowest ones.
After I had the notes down pretty well I added double stops tried to work on speed, added blue notes, slides hammer-ons, and trying to add in some of the more distinctive riffs etc… and that is pretty much all I practice usually an hour or more each day.
While I am still a ways from being a good player I feel like I am headed the right direction and can see steady progress. My biggest hurdle is speed. I just do not seem to be able to move my fingers in a coordinated way fast enough -part of that might be that I am 60 and I am asking my fingers to do something which they have never had to do before. But part of that is just learning efficiency of motion which I think is very gradually improving. But I also think that good style is as important or more important than speed. So even if I never get to be a fast player I think that I will eventually learn how to play well.
Once you learn this then playing along with any song in general is no problem -although being able to say -replicate a fiddle tune on the fly and stay very close to melody would require great talent I think.