I definitely didn’t expect when I started trying to learn Japanese ~a year ago that I’d be frustrated that not enough words were written using kanji sometimes, but that is definitely where WK put me. 
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Hahah vast swathes of hiragana are indeed horrific!
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Same lol
And ふりがな is the another Devil!
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If I had to say, I would say for me the meat of the grammar is in N3/half of N2 (the other half can piss off back to the boardroom/middle ages). It all depends on what your goals are. As I always feel that I cannot quite be specific enough in Japanese, the N3 and N2 levels and their variants of earlier grammar felt to be exactly where the “meat” is.
N5/N4 is the easiest by far (with a few exceptions) exactly because at that point you are skipping along oblivious to the fact the you going to be replacing 25% of all things with something else 66% of the time.
A means B. La la la. Nuance crit 3 months later.
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I dunno… you make it sound like N3/N2 are the spices to me. 
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I was, and still am to some degree, really far behind in terms of grammar. At the time I already knew about 20% of N3 vocabulary and 80% of N3 kanji (writing), I only knew about half of the N5 grammar, which is, admittedly, quite embarrassing. I quickly jumped onto Bunpro less than 2 months ago because I don’t really like reading. In the beginning, I couldn’t really understand 80% of sentences in NHK News Easy or practically any sentence in the seinen manga I’d be interested in. Today I’ve learned the last N4 grammar point, while not making a whole lot of vocabulary progress, and I can tell you that I’m now able to get the gist of the majority of conversational, non-technical sentences In the simpler kind of seinen manga and upon reading an entire NHK News Easy article, I have a very general idea of its content. I can’t really interpret the grammar very well in a spoken form because it’s still far too fast for me, but that is more of a matter of practice. What I’m trying to say is that yes, the N5 and N4 grammar is indeed very important and as has been said before, it’s another natural case of Zipf’s law. Lastly, a worthwhile consideration is that Bunpro alone is a poor grammar teacher because you only reinforce specific example sentences and phrases in your memory, so what you really need to make any use of it is to practice those grammar points elsewhere to actually get a hang of how they’re used. That being said, of course, the more advanced grammar is still very much necessary, and at the very least the N3 and N2 grammar is relatively commonly found even in daily conversations, but given the N4 knowledge, you can approximately deduce many of the more advanced rules. After all, that’s how humans naturally learn languages.
Addendum: I used to use Duolingo (the older version) daily for about 3-4 years and I haven’t learned virtually anything compared to the 8 months of WaniKani, 7 months of KameSame and 2 months of Bunpro, so if anyone is still honestly using that to learn anything but the very basics of western languages, you’re almost certainly just wasting your time there. Granted, the new version of a bit better, largely thanks to the introduction of kanji instead of using virtually exclusively kana (for those who haven’t experienced it, it was an immeasurable pain to deal with the machine-translated sentences written in kana only and that’s why kanji is absolutely essential to comfortable reading), but it still doesn’t even begin to compare to less guided, more hardcore learning methods that don’t give you any immediate gains, but eventually teach you far more than Duolingo could ever hope to.
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I hear what you are saying about it being the spice as it “adds flavour to the base material”, but fundamentally it depends on how you define “meat” and what your goals are:
Cambridge defines the “meat” of something as: important, valuable, or interesting information.
If you are interested in something more nuanced than genki I robot sentences, N3+ is definitely where the meat is at.
Others, with a focus solely on attaining basic conversational ability are going to find the “meat” in N5/N4.
I have limited experience with N1 things, so I cannot comment on if it just falls off beyond N2, but so far, N2 has provided me with more valuable and interesting information pertaining to Japanese in terms of my goals. So I stand by my “meat”. XD
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Are there unnatural cases?
Also welcome to the forums!
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…And there we go, I’m at this point again almost a year later. 
Not super long after this point last year, work got really busy, and I was still blasting through WaniKani, so I put BunPro on vacation mode and unfortunately it stayed that way for almost the rest of the year. In the meantime, I reached level 60 of WaniKani, though months later it’s only quite recently that it’s been feeling like my review load is lighter.
Anyway, in November I reset every grammar point here, and this time around I’ve been doing a steady 3 grammar points per day, instead of the 6 or more I was often doing the first time around. This is much better! I am also loving the improvements that are being added in real time right now.
Anyway, glad to be “fluent” in N5/N4 again. 
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I’ve found that three new grammar points per day is my sweet spot, too. I blasted through N5 and N4, though because I found most of that was review for me (I came into Bunpro having already studied Japanese for 18 months before).
That being said, in response to your original post, I’d say that N3 contains a good amount of very common grammar. Based on what I’ve seen so far, while N3 does have some things usually only used in formal speech or writing, N2 is really where things start to fall off (in terms of things not commonly used in everyday langauge). I’m almost done with N2, and I’ve noticed several things that I had never encountered before. That being said, I’ve only been studying for two years, so my experience is limited. I think @hunglikeconan came to the same conclusion.
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While I do use Duolingo still (entirely for practice and exposure to new vocabulary), I completely agree with your assessment. In fact, I’ll go further: for Japanese, Duo is a garbage learning product. Absolute garbage.
(If you use Duo and you like it, fine. I use Duo and I hate it–and for good reasons.)
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so far I have done 45 points in N3 (doing 2 a day) and I am enjoying them a lot, way more than N4.
As soon as I finish it and start N2 (then I will do only 1 point per day) I will try reading manga and watching anime with japanese subtitle somehow (somehere?) to fix those points in my mind.
I am not into books or novels, even in my native language and english I dont like to read all that much
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I went into Duolingo Japanese the other day for a few minutes, because I hadn’t looked at it in maybe a year or more. It seems there have been some improvements, like some of the audio seems to be real human voices, and there are listening-practice dialogues and such. But I don’t doubt that, overall, it’s still not a great tool for learning Japanese. It’s what I started with (2 years ago) and I abandoned it within weeks.
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The voices in Duo (at least in Japanese) are definitely not real people. They’re all TTS. Recently, they’ve added more that are even worse. They frequently mispronounce words (especially mixing up 訓読み and 音読み) and mangle certain sounds (I just had one pronounce この間 as このたん, which I think was supposed to be このかん, but the pronunciation should’ve been このあいだ). The way the original female Japanese TTS voice speaks is particularly maddening. It’s insanely fast, seems to slur words together, skipping over pauses that native speakers often make (after certain particles, conjunctions, etc.), and speaks in this robotic, metronomic cadence that really makes it hard to distinguish word divisions. All of it adds up to an experience that is very frustrating for learners. That’s why I say it’s usable for practice, but is awful for learning.
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Hoo boy, I definitely do remember the horrible on’yomi/kun’yomi errors. What a mess that was.
Guess I was mistaken that I heard anything recorded. I thought some lines were, but I only did one skip-ahead test and nothing else.
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how are you level 59 if youve only been on here a month and just completed N5?
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The original post dates back from one year ago.
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ooooohhh haha thank you i was so confused
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I’m at N2 and am trying to do one a day. I keep finding myself getting home after studying at work, deciding to “take a break,” and then suddenly realizing it’s time for me to sleep.
I’m trying to follow along the order 新完全マスター presents them. I figure that when the book is finished I’ll just come back and clean up any extra Bunpro declares as N2. Having a little quiz for each grammar point, along with Bunpro helping me to remember the grammar point to begin with, has really been helping me so far.
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