First off regarding the bonuses.. OP, you seem to be overlooking the fact that an individual can move to another site to clear a bonus and still move up in stakes. I play 200nl on Pokerstars right now. $600 is still a relatively good amount of money.. I could easily ship my roll (or even a portion so I can still play while waiting on transferring money) over to FTP, and grind out the bonus there playing $100nl or $200nl. Once done, I will have another 3-6 buyins in which I could (and would!!!) ship back to Pokerstars. So to say that bonus whoring is affecting your ability to improve and get to higher stakes is just wrong imo.

Now regarding multitabling.. To most individuals, especially on this site, poker is about making money. We read, study, learn, play to make money. Hell, the site slogan is "Making money is fun". So, if you follow in this mantra then you are going to do what you have to do to increase your inflow of cash from poker. And multi-tabling is probably going to be your best bet.

The more tables you add, the more hands you get in. Unless playing more tables does drastically decrease your winrate (which in my experience everyone has a limit, but if you find the sweet spot then you shouldn't see a huge winrate difference), then you will obviously increase your $/hr by playing more tables.

This doesn't mean I'm advocating turning into a robot at all times, and doing nothing but grinding your ass off, and not improving (yeah I said it.. Fuck you SNE chasers ). But... You CAN have a mixture of both making money and improving. As Jager stated most of your learning/studying/epiphanies are going to occur away from the table. So do plenty of studying to get better. Then also just because you play 16 tables generally, doesn't mean you can't mix in "study sessions", where you grind only 4-6 tables to focus and make sure your lines are on point. Sessions that you can and SHOULD break down and study later. This allows for both improvement (on and off table), and allows you to increase your hourly, which will allow you to build that BR you need to move up in stakes.