I think simulators are the best thing since slice bread. You can do months of trading in a week and get loads of practice. The reason it takes so long to learn trading is because you have to wait on the market. It is also ideal for those times when you dont want to lose sleep to practice.
I wish someone would modify MT4 to accomplish this task by either making an script or even a local server to serve the data. Although a script might be much easier. I think the modified period converter script could be further modified to do this but I am not a programmer so I could be wrong. It would allow forward testing of historical data, of some sort, for strategies and indicators.