It's always valuable to have a generalizable skill. But design is fundamentally a craft; an applied art. It's problem-solving. And like any craft, there are tools and techniques that are tried and true. You could approach woodworking with a ground-up Systems Thinking approach, but would you turn down the advice of a carpenter with 30 years of experience? Technically all you need to understand woodworking is a physics textbook and maybe an organic chemistry textbook.

My guess is you're a software developer (as I am), and in my opinion the fatal flaw of our group is the incorrect belief that we could do anything or solve any problem by simply decomposing it into smaller and smaller components. The thing is, for a big enough problem, there are an almost infinite number of ways to break it down and then build it back up. In optimization terms, complex projects are highly nonlinear problems, so you may be able to understand what the inputs are, but it sometimes takes wisdom and experience to tune the parameters.