A Rubik’s cube looks worse halfway through than it did scrambled. Messy middles aren’t failures.

Progress can look exactly like going backwards. Any real method passes through states that are uglier than where you started, because getting the last pieces right means temporarily breaking the pieces that were accidentally fine. Scrambled and half-solved look similar from the outside and are nothing alike.

When it looks worse, check whether you are mid-method or genuinely lost. Are you following steps that somebody has used before, or making it up. If it is the first one, keep going through the ugly part, because the ugly part is where the solution is being assembled.