> I don’t agree that doing everything yourself manually is the only thing that can grant you that understanding, because I don’t think that understanding is domain-specific. It evolves naturally as soon as someone realizes that their list of unknown unknowns is FAR larger than their list of known anythings, and that the first step in attempting to solve a problem is to prune that list as far as you can get it while realizing you will never ever be able to reduce it to zero.

This isn't true, a car mechanic never evolves into an engineer, a nurse never evolve into a doctor. A car mechanic can learn to do some tasks you normally need an engineer for and same with nurses, but they never build the entire core set of skills that separates engineers from mechanics and doctors from nurses.

There are maybe some exceptions to this, but those exceptions are so rare that it doesn't matter for this discussion. A few people still learning it properly wont save anything.

> This isn’t true, a car mechanic never evolves into an engineer, a nurse never evolve into a doctor.

“Doesn’t generally happen” =/= “is literally impossible”. The word “never” should be used with care.

> A car mechanic can learn to do some tasks you normally need an engineer for and same with nurses

This statement can only make sense if you regard titles as something that’s imbued upon you, and until it is, you are incapable of performing the acts that someone who has earned that tile can perform. I’ll just say I fundamentally disagree with this notion on pretty much every conceivable level, and if that’s the belief system you subscribe to, that would also makes arguing about this any further pointless. But I might just be getting you wrong.