John,
Do you walk subconsciously?
Not in China or you will fall into a hole.

When you were learning to walk did you ever fall?
Of course.
I'm going to tell you something else that applies to missing shots.
Mastering a skill to where you can perform it subconsciously is not enough. Think about what would happen if I asked you to walk across a 6" beam stretched between the top of two skyscrapers with nothing undernieth. I'm willing to bet that it would be hard for you to develope the ability to eliminate that picture in your head of a possibility of falling. If you cant remain confident then your conscious mind will want to take over and you would start to pay a lot more attention to where your weight is, how big your steps are, etc. I'm also willing to bet that walking across that beam becomes much harder than if that same beam were laying on the ground. As I said, mastering a skill to where you can easily perform it subconsciously is not enough, in order to really become a ball pocketing macbine you must learn how to play subconsciously under pressure.
Of course and you are talking to someone who used to jump from 30meter, 1ft wide platforms into an 18ft foot pool.
Of course you can and should master any method until it becomes subconscious. But this is not what you are saying when you say that people are making shot using the subconscious simply by applying CTE.
You cannot explain that a player can try a shot that they have never tried before and make it not once but many times as the subconscious kicking in due to using CTE. The subconscious is trained through trial and error. Thus misses using CTE are either due to NOT using the right visuals OR a stroke error. The corrections are stroke first to insure that it's not the problem and visuals second. Once a person learns to identify the right visuals then the rest of the way is formula, pivot to center ball and shoot. THAT is why a person can learn CTE and go to shots in the middle of a game that they have never played before and make them. That is why there is no trial and error training of the subconscious needed on a shot by shot basis. One only needs to shoot the thick shots, the thin shots and the super thin shots OR in the case of ProOne shoot the reference shots until the visuals are clear and then any shot that is within the ranges can be done with the same visuals.
The subconscious part comes in where you have internalized the visuals to the point that you never have to bother with checking the lines. You see the CTE line right away and move into the shot fluidly and quickly.
Once that level of proficiency is achieved then it's mostly subconscious with the conscious knowledge to fall back on should you need to double check.
C.j. can probrably explain how much easier the game becomes when you can perform great without much conscious thought. I believe he has a drill of going down into your stance and shooting imediately, without any backstrokes. That drill is designed for people who get down and start to consciously make adjustments to improve their aim imo. I'd like to hear C.J. Discuss if he had to develope or study mental techniques in order to remain pocketing balls while gambling for high stakes against guys you can't afford to miss against.
You don't need to tell me this. I named my former case brand Instroke to signify the place I always want to be when playing.
Jimmy Ried named his DVD "No time for negative." that's the perfect name for a DVD on pocket billiards IMO.
I know Jimmy and have taken lessons from him when he was in Germany. He understands the value of systems as baselines to operate from. But let's stick to the point. You assertion that CTE only works because of subconscious adjustment is not correct in my opinion.
I cannot stress enough that if you are truly interested in the method then learn it. If you do that and then you come back and say well, here at step 2 is where the subconscious kicks in then we can discuss that and dissect it. Until then you are speculating about a system you don't understand which is about the same as me looking at a bunch of pipes with no clue where any of them go and trying to decipher what they do. I might know what a few of them are supposed to be for based on their composition but I could not say for certain how the system works until I studied it a bit. Throwing out the blanket of subconscious adjustment is inadequate.