Shattered Kingdoms

Heh. I think I can speak to this.

In my experience players get skillups two ways.
Either learning from your mistakes (skillcheck failure) or successful completion (skillcheck success).

If you have eparry and parry trained what happens is that your successful completion of eparry skillup (for example, parrying bare hands) goes into parry until it is mastered. At which point your successfull skillups start going into eparry.

The other side of it is the failures. If you have eparry and parry trained your "failure skillups" go directly into eparry.

If you have only parry trained both failure skillups and regular completion skillups go into parry, but you won't be able to parry bare hands.
If you have only eparry trained - I'm don't know.

And like I said, that experience is what happens when parrying tons of bare attacks. It could very well be different if you were parrying weapons only, as eparry increases the parry chance.

You can't learn from your mistakes with parry or eparry.

I think I'm even more confused now than before

All you need to know is that I am tough.

I am pretty sure that you can get better at dirt kicking without actually blinding an enemy.

Yes, you must master parry before you can start improving at eparry. Also if parry is not mastered, parrying barehand attacks gives you the chance to improve at normal parry.