Good question. .
I really couldn’t tell you how a lot of my tendencies developed or evolved, or why.
A lot of how I play and hear was apparently fixed by teenage formative listening and my early brute force practice attempts.
I had no idea what I was doing, no idea where I’d eventually arrive.
I see that now.

If there’s anything I’m doing naturally at this point I probably got it listening to the Allman Brothers or Johnny Winter.

I am conscious in most “singing melody” situations of trying to play every note at the last possible instant and hold each note as long as possible.
There may be a little of that in there too, “post formative listening” awareness of intent. .

The majority of my metronome abuse as a youth had the pulse on “and” or 2 + 4 for anything other than straight scale stuff.

Hope that helps!
I wish I understood it better myself. .

Hey, I should have addressed the “change anything” question better.

Yeah, hindsight being 20/20 and regrets about past decisions being more or less indelible, I would have done everything differently.

I’m self taught, fucking clueless. I had no idea where things might lead, what the “right stuff” to practice was, who to play with, what good music was or what a musical life meant.
I just did my best with what little I had and kept my shoulder to the wheel.

In hindsight, there are any number of crossroads I could have made better decisions at, but I’d need a time machine or an extra 700 years of life on this Earth to remedy any of that now.

The flipside is if I could go back and do everything differently, there’s no guarantee I’d do any better.
It’d still be me making the decisions, and there’s no reason to suspect I’d be more clairvoyant about results a half century later the second time than I was the first.

So, yeah. . differently. .
I could have been more serious about it, or less serious.
etc.

Anyway, it’s a long game.