Spoilers: he did not use a metronome!
Slightly more serious spoiler: just doing mindless repetitions in training was not the answer. Studying, measuring and refining details was.
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Let me slightly rearrange your words so that I would agree with them:
“Studying, measuring and refining details: use a metronome!“
There are reasons that the classical people like them so much, could it really be that they’re mindless and rote? Nah! 
Haha of course I was being cheeky!
Of course I don’t have anything against metronomes in an absolute sense. They do a specific job (providing regular clicks), and that can be useful in a variety of ways!
PS: as a swimmer, I do mindless repetition of my training sets and haven’t gotten any faster for like 12 years 
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Do you have a coach? (Over here, the analogous question is, “do you have a teacher?”)
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Sounds like you just haven’t found the right motion yet 
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That’s totally true! I remember in training one day I did something slightly different and suddenly I dropped 2-3 seconds every 50m for a particular set, consistently and without increasing effort.
I think the set was something like an anaerobic-threshold kinda thing, 8x50m on 50’’ (or 1’?), where I would normally average 34’’, maybe 33’’ on a good day. Suddenly I was doing 8 times 31’’ without breaking a sweat.
I completely forgot what I did differently that day and from the next session I went back to my studpid slow technique
@kgk is right that I’d need a one-to-one coach who gives me real-time feedback in every single set, and possibly underwater filming etc. to really work out what details need to change. But that requires a lot of resources!
I currently rely on a remote coach and train on my own, so I can only use a clock to estimate my pace, count my strokes and use general self-perception. Very hard to fix any issues this way, without an external eye.
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The underwater 
!
(More characters to hit minimum.)
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and just how do you know you’ve broken a sweat if you’re already in water??? Sorry I guess I’m in a trolling mood. I’ll cease and desist.
That’s a shame. I hope you catch it again someday! Some small optimization, likely.
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I’m aware of the spirit of this conversation, but I actually had a major swimming breakthrough a few years ago because of some fundamental changes in my understanding of how to swim. I had gone through traditional “Red Cross” learn-to-swim education as a child, but through a combination of childish ignorance and perhaps less-than-stellar instruction, had failed to put together a few of the key lessons.
Until a few years ago, I thought of front float and rear float merely as isolated water competencies to be learned, and hadn’t made any particular effort to integrate them into actual swimming. That is, until recently, on those rare occasions I tried to swim, my front crawl consisted of dragging myself haphazardly through the water with inefficient body position because I didn’t didn’t pay proper attention to how breath control and head position affected my body’s rotation around it’s center of buoyancy. Instead of floating in the water and propelling myself across it, I had been constantly “climbing” toward the surface.
I know this information my not be particularly relevant to anyone, but for me it was very much a “single-escape versus stringhopping” moment.
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(creates Solving the Stroke website)
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Nice! Bonus points for even nailing the alliteration!
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“Do not google that!” 
Seriously though, the ideas that helped me are a well-established part of swim coaching, while they are perhaps not always well communicated.
I picked them up from a book with a bit of a sensationalistic title: “Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way To Swim Better, Faster, and Easier” by Terry Laughlin, but the basic ideas are well known and available from a variety of sources. The points I took are ancillary to the main pitch of the book, which makes claims about arm position and hydrodynamic efficiency. What was most useful to me was the book’s explanation of the old and widely repeated metaphor of “pressing down on your buoy” or “pressing down on your chest”.
A few free related articles:
2m16s to 4m26s of the training video below uses the “pressing the buoy” expression and gives some practical advice, though it’s not the best at helping to understand the underlying principle:
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Actually your observations are 100% relevant, particularly regarding body position and alignment of the various body segments!
If you watch the start of the interview at the top, you’ll see that Mc Evoy dropped about 0.4 second in his first 15 meters by working on body position as well as improving his standing jump by a few centimeters. That kind of improvement is an eternity at that elite level, and in fact if you look at the results of the Paris 50 Freestyle final you’ll see 0.35 is the difference between gold and arriving last!
PS: these times are insane. I don’t think I could even get close with fins on
PPS: meanwhile, strong with all this information, I still swim with the following posture
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Wow! Thats very fast 
Slightly off topic question (but still water sport related ), has anyone here tried Underwater Hockey (aka Octopush)?
@tommo I notice that your profile says you are located in Nottingham, UK. There is an Underwater hockey club in Nottingham which I happen to play at, It would be really cool if you wanted to try it out!
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