Before I get to the critique proper, I want to address the reason you gave me behind why you submitted and canceled several times (setting aside the ones that I assume were technical difficulties, as I can see that you submitted your cylinder challenge a total of 8 times). You mentioned that you had done the work, and decided to then tackle it again because you felt you could tackle it better, and you felt this was adhering to the idea of "doing the work to the best of your current ability".

What this means is that while you're doing the work, you need to give yourself whatever you require to do the work to the best of your current ability - which mainly means giving yourself as much time as you require to go through the instructions, and to review them periodically throughout the process, and to give yourself as much time as you need to actually execute the work as well as you can - down to every individual mark you make.

You should not however be completing the work, then looking back and deciding that you can do better (based on your own judgment) and then deciding to scrap the work and start over. This is very specifically grinding, which as discussed in Lesson 0 is something students are not to do. You complete the amount of work that was assigned, and only that, doing your best to give yourself the time you need.

Now, it's likely been a very long time since you last revisited Lesson 0, so I encourage you to watch this video that was released last Spring, which explains in detail how students should be approaching this course. The point about min-maxing is one that you should pay special attention to as well, as I think overthinking things is how you ended up in this particular predicament, whereas the intention here is to leave much of that decision making to me as your instructor (in terms of whether you should be doing revisions).

Anyway, moving onto the critique, starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes are very well done. You've done a great job of drawing your ellipses with confidence, maintaining a nice, even shape, and your side edges show a great deal of control while still maintaining a consistent trajectory without any wobbling. When it comes to the cylindrical structures themselves, you're demonstrating a really solid grasp of 3D space here - specifically in how you're handling the foreshortening.

You're demonstrating a clear understanding of how the foreshortening itself helps convey the part of the cylinder's length that exists only in the "unseen" dimension of depth (as opposed to what can be seen in the two dimensions of the page itself), and the fact that you're allowing both manifestations of that foreshortening (the shift in scale from one end to the other, as well as the shift in degree) to operate in tandem. It's never one shift being dramatic and the other more subtle, they work together, and you appear to demonstrate a clear awareness of this (even if it's subconscious). Furthermore, the fact that as we get more foreshortening you compensate by reducing the visible distance between the ellipses (allowing them to overlap without hesitation) demonstrates yet further that your grasp of 3D space here is coming along very well.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is similarly well done. This exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).

Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.

In applying the line extensions as thoroughly and consistently as you have here, you've continuously given yourself a clear idea of where your convergences can be adjusted to yield better results, and you've worked to apply those discoveries as you progressed through the set. At this point I'm quite confident that your instincts for what proportions to employ to achieve squared ends, regardless of how the box is oriented, have developed plenty well enough to help you out in Lesson 6.

I will point out however that everything I've said here, I believe I would have said when you initially submitted the work (based on what I remember seeing of it, though I glanced fairly quickly). Grinding away before receiving feedback did not change that, and that's something to keep in mind. What you're doing in completing this homework is creating a body of work that allows me to assess whether you're understanding the material, or whether there are any gaps in your understanding that I need to clarify. Going forward, focus on doing the work to the best of your ability, but do not give yourself the opportunity to assess afterwards whether or not it should be done. That's my responsibility, and it's the service you're paying for.

Lastly, to address your observations, you are correct. Dramatic foreshortening conveys one of two things - that either the object in question is very large, or that it is extremely close to the viewer. The larger the object is, the farther away it can be while still maintaining dramatic foreshortening. Conversely, shallow foreshortening tells the viewer that either the object is quite small (not allowing for the convergence of those parallel edges when drawn in 2D to really have much of an effect due to the limited distance it's covering), or that the object is very far away (where things tend to flatten out). At its core, foreshortening is the marriage between scale and distance from the viewer.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.