Having read your thoughts on essay paper, I conclude that you have rightly pointed out the factors which are responsible for the failure of most of aspirants in essay paper. And you also said that practicing and giving more time were the key to make one enable to get through this paper. In the syllabus, there's something important written about the essay that candidates are expected to reflect comprehensive and researched based knowledge. And I guess, these two points sum up everything. One can only be able write the comprehensive essay when he has thoroughly carried out a research on the the topics and one can develop this ability by reading and writing extensively. As you mentioned that most of the aspirants are of the opinion that making outlines for the essay topics are enough for the preparation which is really a wrong strategy for this paper and due to which most of the aspirants fail. What needs to be done is that one first marks the repetitive topics by going through the past papers and then study thoroughly one by one along with practice.