Playing pinball, is there techniques to keep the ball in play?

[InDarkestNight]

Trying to learn to play pinball yet again. Taking a more methodical attempt. I can never seem to be able to progress in a game. I just sit there and hit targets until the ball escapes me. Every time I start a mode, it ends with the ball going down the drain. My scores are all over the place. They range from 100,000s to 10,000,000s. Such a variance makes me feel like I'm just getting lucky. Looking at what's going wrong, my biggest problem seems to be just keeping the ball in play. As I said, I can never seem to keep it in play nearly long enough to complete a mode. I never time out, I just lose the ball attempting to hit the targets. Most of the time the reason they ball escpaes me is because it flies too fast past the flippers for me to respond. This has made me think maybe I shouldn't really be bothering with pinball. Why when I'm far too slow to play it? I've always been slow, and now that I'm nearing 40 its obvious that isn't going to change. There is also the problem of the ball going down the middle or into the outlanes. What am I supposed to do about that?

If it matters, I own the Pinball Arcade and Pinball fx3. I've mainly been playing the latter, specifically the Sorcerer's Lair and Captain America tables, because they seem to be the simplest. Decided to switch to the x-men table to try and teach myself to 'aim for angles' rather than specific targets. Of course, I have the same damn problem; I Just can't keep the ball in play long enough to accomplish anything.

I can't list all the tables I have for Pinball Arcade without jumping back and forth into the game. The DLC I have for Pinball fx3 is:

Williams collection 1,2,4,6

Universal Monsters

Marvel Original Pack

Marvel Vengeance and Virtue

Marvel Legends

And yes, I bought most of these in bundles. So I have all the tables from these plus the Sorcerer's Lair table that comes default from the game.

For pinball arcade, the ones I can recall are resue 911, gladiators, haunted house, some frankenstein game, and going nuts. I can't seem to get steam to list the dlc I have, maybe because they were removed in 2018 shortly after I got the game. Fml.

How can I fix this problem? Can I even fix it at my age? What boards should I be playing and why? It just seems hopeless...