Hi, Maven!
I’ve been DJing for about 3 years now, and I also don’t do a lot of fancy stuff myself… I am starting to do a bit of 4 deck mixing, but it’s mostly just not all that useful for the kinds of music I play, as I play music with heavy vocal content, so I am already plenty busy keeping them from clashing and it doesn’t seem to bring anything to my mixes that I really want or need.
Same for FX, I just don’t really find that I need them much to have a mix that sounds awesome to my ears.
Like Chuck, I make heavy use of EQ all over the place for shaping the music, as he says, that’s our hammer and screwdriver set right there.
Unlike Chuck, though, I am not a mobile DJ, but a party/small festival DJ, so I do tend to be focused on a subset of genres… but that is mostly related to how I pick and curate my collection. Most of the skills I’ve developed have translated just fine to other types of music when I’ve had reason to play other styles, though honestly, I tend to find mixing styles that never have vocals to not be very interesting for me personally.
I wouldn’t stress too much about your “technical skills timeline.”
.
