Yea, to put it simply - it basically comes down to energy management skills more than anything, and to manage your energy effectively you need to know your aircraft's individual quirks as much as possible. The best way to do that would be to pick one plane and learn it as well as you can before moving on to other ones. That way you learn what to look out for.
By comparison to energy management, gunnery in dogfighting is pretty easy - outside of learning deflection shooting, what to aim for, and how to not spray or shoot from useless distances, it's all mostly luck anyway :p
At one point I got pretty good at dogfighting in an F-16 (yes, even with guns only), but I'm equally useless with both a 109 and a Spitfire
