I discovered Duolingo last summer(?), with an interest in learning some French. Having learned Spanish the old fashioned way (8 years of classroom study, then a year at the University of Madrid, all in Spanish), I got a little bit frustrated with the approach, feeling like I was missing some of the basics. Plus, the way they pronounced the French, different variations sounded exactly the same to me. So after a while, I thought I'd do as you did, and brush up on my Spanish, especially grammar.
I managed to test out of all the levels that allowed for that, but ran across some vocabulary choices that didn't make sense to me. Your explanation of Latin American Spanish vs. Castillian Spanish may explain why. Guess I may need to 're-learn' a few things...  (BTW, my spell checker rejected spelling 'Castillian' with two 'l's. All English dictionaries I checked also prefer one 'l', but that doesn't look right to me, so I'm reverting back to a Spanish-style spelling... )
Did you find Duolingo and Babel comparable in the approach they use? I've always wondered about that. I haven't logged in to Duolingo for a long time because it seemed to be going very slowly, but I could use some updating on western Spanish vocabulary and current idiomatic expressions. Watching more Spanish language TV would probably be helpful.
It finally occurred to me that a Google search (doh!) would probably be a good idea for a resource on common grammar problems and I did run across some good possibilities. If anyone else is interested, here are a few (after just a cursory look) that looked most promising:
http://www.spanish.cl/Grammar/Notes.htm
http://www.spanishlanguageguide.com/grammar/
And this one had a great overview (think I'll start here), with some simple rules that I'd never seen presented this way before:
http://www.dummies.com/languages/spanish/spanish-grammar-for-dummies-cheat-sheet/
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