Funny that you mention 台, because I at some point learned its actual meaning in a very roundabout way through 灯台下暗し (“it’s darkest under the lamp post”) and a couple of extra vocab searches. Turns out that other than the machine counter, it has more to do with platforms and surfaces so calling it “machine” is very misleading 
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Or as a suffix for villages? 
I agree, although I’ve found guessing the reading of a kanji from it’s components has become quite useful in the higher teen levels.
“You must go into the country to hear what news at London” 
Google only shows 1120 search results for it and most of them are from definitions of 灯台下暗し, strange that it’s in Japanese dictionaries
you must go into the country to hear what news at London
This 17th-century proverb was not intended to cast particular aspersions on Londoners’ awareness of events in their own city, but rather to suggest that one may often apprehend the most accurate news of home when one goes abroad
If you feel like it’s time to quit now then I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, all your points are very valid and you’ve covered enough material here that I think you will probably be fine to learn the rest via exposure. Especially if you haven’t done much grammar study until now is should certainly become more of your focus.
A few other things I’d like to say:
Maybe instead of quitting entirely you should just severely reduce the pace of learning for the last 7 levels you have, you can spread it out for it to take you several months or even another year to cover those last few levels. This way you can still learn them without much strain. Sure, some of the Kanji/Vocab on those levels is rare but just glancing over it I can still see a lot of useful and common ones as well that are simply up there because of Kanji complexity.
That said perhaps it’s not worth it for you to extend your subscription just for that which would be understandable.
When it comes to the issue of mnemonics being vague, it’s understandably annoying but these are also only meant to be a temporary solution. They are not really meant to help you remember the meaning/reading long term, only enough for you to start associating it with the shapes that make the Kanji.
Thinking about it logically, no matter how good your memory is or how good the human brain is at remembering stories, there is 2000 Kanji here and most of it has two or more “stories” attached to them. You will never remember all of it, especially when the stories are short, similar, unengaging and make little sense. They are only meant to stay in your head for a week or two (depending on your pace of progress), then disappear into the void, hopefully by then you’ve made a connection between the Kanji and its meaning + reading.
Your English definitely is quite good, I won’t deny that or rather, you have my praise. That aside, words like “stirring” or “rousing” are not something I would classify as rare to come across. Particularly “stirring up trouble” is a very common English expression so just by means of that the word can’t be that rare, it’s also commonly used in cooking e.g. “stirring the pot” or “stirring the vegetables”. If you haven’t come across them much then maybe it’s because of limited exposure to content/situations where they would be used.
Anyway, my point is, just because you haven’t come across some words yet doesn’t mean you should classify them as rare or less useful when you finally do, this goes for both English and Japanese. It’s always good to expand your vocabulary.
That’s all I’ve got. Good luck in your grammar studies and remember to have fun learning. If it’s not fun, take a break 
I’m equally annoyed when my Japanese wife looks at an example sentence and says “I don’t even know what they’re trying to say.”
Question is…should I be annoyed with her, or should I be annoyed with WK?
That’s a bit of an ironic example, as discerning is the ability to tell things apart and know the differences 
I’m guessing this is probably because the example sentences use kana for vocabulary you haven’t learned yet. I’ve stopped reading them for this reason—it’s too hard to parse! I wish it gave furigana examples instead.
My wife is quite experienced at reading kana. She is Japanese.
I think I’m gonna stick it out to 60.
I’ve been reading a lot recently, and when I look up kanji that I don’t know, usually maybe 30-40% of it is available in the later levels of WK.
That might not sound like a huge number, but it’s significant enough to motivate me to go all the way.
Good to know! How often do you come across kanji you’ve never seen before at level 45?
Less than I’d expect actually. I’m currently reading 蜘蛛ですが何か, and I’ve run into an average of maybe 0-2 unknown kanji per page over the last 10 pages I’ve read.
It’s an isekai LN, so there are skills and stuff with less common kanji here and there, but aside from those, the kanji isn’t much of an issue.
Three of the kanji that I didn’t know before showed up just right on 45 and 46.
魂 as in soul, 嬢 as in お嬢さん, 魔 as in magic - all pretty common in a story like the one I’m reading.
Most of my lookups involve new words whose kanji I can already read, or non-kanji words, or kanji from the earlier levels of WK that I’ve forgotten.
The last 10 Levels of WK were a drag for some reason. I remember trying to convince myself that, “I’ve come this far. Might as well go all the way”, but man was it tough, especially the last 5 levels. I still have 10 more vocab to go through, which I will do tomorrow, even though it’s been more than a week since I’ve reached level 60. I would usually be done with a level by now.
Taking a break is a wise choice. I quickly reached the 30s after starting WaniKani but put it on the backburner for a few years until my general comprehension greatly outpaced my kanji ability, then did the remaining 15-20 levels or so in a few months. I see some people who quickly finish everything, then reset to review some levels again when they find themselves not actually getting to use higher-level words, which in my opinion is an undesirable use of time.
In my opinion, as someone who uses Japanese every day in a variety of casual to highly professional settings, the kanji and vocabulary in levels 50-60 are highly common and useful, but having learnt somewhere over 3000 kanji at this point, my strategy for kanji of this frequency gradually changed from learning through mnemonics and relying on their meanings, to learning kanji as “that one character which appears in this specific word”, which is a valid strategy as most low frequency joyo or joyogai are used in only one or two words you actually see. This is honestly part of the reason the WaniKani model of learning the kanji, then the vocabulary would likely be ineffective for most kanji less frequent than these.
Oof
Ouch
Owwie
Same
And then I ended up resetting to level 55 anyway lol
Your reasons seem sensible to me. Especially during the later levels, I too found that Wanikani’s word soup mnemonics had outlived their usefulness. I stopped using them after some time, and I don’t use mnemonics in my Anki decks, at least not consciously.
As far as the Kanji in the last ten levels being useful, I will say this: if you move onto reading native material, you will almost certainly encounter them. But the truth is that you will always encounter Kanji you don’t know, even those not listed as 常用漢字 or 人名用漢字. My rule of thumb is, if you say you’ll never need to know such and such Kanji, that Kanji is almost certain to appear when you read next 
But since you have a good Kanji foundation, you can learn the level 50+ Kanji as you encounter them and not feel overwhelmed.
No no, you misunderstand! Your wife is quite skilled at reading Japanese with kanji. After spending an entire adult lifetime reading kanji, it’s annoying and difficult to have to re-parse what word is meant by the kana.
For example, imagine reading an English sentence except with half the words replaced with their katakana equivalent, or IPA phonetic alphabet pronunciation. it would feel very unnatural indeed.
I was just wondering if that was the holdup your wife was having, or if it really was that the grammar of the sentences was off.
Japanese people wouldn’t say they can’t figure out what someone is trying to say because some parts of the sentence use kana when they are used to kanji.
Japanese people can read stuff written in kana fine, it just takes a bit more effort. Im pretty sure some old games used mostly kana too or something like that.
Ok, well it varies by person, but it has specifically happened to me in both directions. I’ve been uncomprehending of someone else’s kana sentence until they told me which kanji, and my Japanese coworkers have been unable to understand things I’ve wrote where I used kana for a word whose character I didn’t know. So maybe it’s not a universal, but it seems some people rely heavily on kanji for meaning.
Your experience is so far removed from that of a native because of the enormous gap in knowledge that I’m not even sure its worth comparing or bringing up.
I’m not sure if you’re talking about a single word in isolation or an entire sentence and if its handwritten or not, but there’s a lot of variables that could cause them to not understand apart from them just relying on kanji. Like…spoken language doesn’t use kanji and they operate just fine when speaking. Context will cover most distinctions between homophones that pitch accent would usually clear up.
I think if natives have trouble understanding something you have written, the issue was probably more on your outputting skills than their comprehension skills.