I wouldn't say I have impressive smartparens skills, but I do definitely use sp bindings all the time. What helped (or made it possible at all?) is I made my super key (right alt for me) the smartparens key. So say s-n is sp-forward-symbol, s-c is sp-clone-sexp and so on. From there on it mostly just takes time. Some will stick, some won't. I remember thinking "barf, slurp sexp, WHAT?". Now I think "too bad barfing is broken in js2...".