Have not improved in photographing protests and Im losing hope.

Hi all,

This is kinda a rant/call for help/looking for advice post. Forgive me if it leans towards rantish though, im feeling pretty emotionally right now.

I just came back from a protest today and I was culling through my photos. I took over 800 photos and only two of them were to my liking. I would say 15% were blurry, 60% had horrible compostion, and 20% had exposure issues (the day kept on going from extremely sunny to shady, so I dont hold too much grief over that). 5% are okay. Not great, nothing im proud of. I expected atleast 50% of my photos today to look like the 5%. But I keep on missing composition, subject isolating, and simply framing my scene. I keep thinking I know what im doing when Im shooting photos, and I kept looking back on my photos every 15-30 photos I took, and I kept thinking that these looked good. But im now looking at them and they are horrible. I didnt even "praticipate" in the protest this time, I simply focused my mind solely on taking photos and I still messed up. I tried shooting from below, above (to the best of my ability, limited elevated options), different focal lengths (18-55), and from different distances. I just never seem to improve no matter how many notes I take on my photography, how many times I mess up, and how many times I retry and go out again.

It especially hurts because I hope to be able to become a conflict photographer in the future and seeing myself not able to do something like this makes me doubt myself if Ill ever be able to something of that nature. And its not as if Im extremely new to photography, Ive been shooting for over three years now, and althought that is nothing compared to everyone else, its not like im unexperienced. I just dont know what to do at this point, or how to feel, or what to tell myself. I want to be a better photographer, and I want to be able to communicate messages with my photos, but everything I produce is boring and flat and uninteresting. I love photographer so much but stuff like this just breaks me.

That last part seemed rantish. sorry. Im just looking for advice. Anything works, and please dont be a smartass or douche, thank you.