Re: ...Instead, spend your time in traffic guessing other drivers' next moves - the possible intuition you may develop is astonishing. I believe a skilled biker often may know car driver's next move before this driver even conciously knows him-/herself.
This is an interesting thought, I'm sure that the more motorcycling experience you gain the more you "intuitively" recognise risky situations without consciously thinking through whats going on. I play table tennis badly but am still surprised at how I sometimes react to a returning ball almost instinctively, I'm sure there is a part of the brain that can recognise situations, and calculate responses almost innately. I suppose the trick with motorcycling is to ride cautiously enough to stay alive whilst your experience grows. This sort f fits in with another current thread about inexperienced riders buying sports bikes
I totally agree.
Try being a courier ! You have to push hard to make it pay, but push too hard and it costs you too much in tyres, chains etc So you're always in a determined frame of mind - if someone does something 'stupid' in front of you, you file it in your head as something to watch out for next time. you slowly build a repertoire of evasive moves and often ride in a position which always has at least 1 escape route. With the years of car driving previously I had an understanding of how the traffic could move.
But what can happen eventually is that as you get better and better at predicting and understanding, you forget about things like sudden mechanical failure, and it becomes the 'long shot' and 'what are the chances of that happening ?' type of things which will get you in the end, so you're best friend is 'considered caution' in the end. It isn't a race, after all......
When I couriered people didn't frequently have mobile phones so you could always attempt to make mirror eye contact, now very few people pay attention particularly in slow moving traffic. nowadays you can pull up next to people and wave your arms about and they still won't see you , simply because they're not looking your way.
In October 2014 i was knocked off by someone who i could see had their phone in their right hand and was using it as a satnav, looking down at it, and I was alongside them on their right going around the roundabout, I was attempting to go straight on from the right hand approach lane. I never imagined that they would continue to turn right from the left lane, so that as we reached the straight ahead exit (2nd exit), they were on my left and just drove right around in front of me. I made 2 'mistakes' apparently, I should have realised they didn't have a clue where they were going and also I should have backed off once I realised they probably hadn't seen me. Their fault anyway, they admitted it and her insurance were very good about everything.
And this week I read that driverless cars could be here by 2020 on our roads.......the driver can choose whether or not to override the car in normal driving mode. It's something that worries me, and that's speaking as someone with a degree in mechatronics (automation and control) who is all in favour of using technology to our advantage. Hopefully the cars will be submissive and you will just need to plonk your bike in front of them to make them back off - My company VW Golf has brake assist and sometimes my colleagues play 'pulling out in front of each other' - the cars are very good at slowing down quickly by themselves to avoid a collision......but one day it could end in tears 
I think the flashing brake light is a no brainer, at least in the sense that it's difficult to find fault with the idea. The brake light is there to grab your attention, whatever you do to enhance that effect is good as far as I'm concerned. 
