> it takes somebody who can hold both extremely large scale problems and very very granular specific implementation problems in your head all at once

This describes the entire software engineering profession to me.

We have come up with all sorts of devices to make this go more smoothly, or to enable us to focus on specific sub-parts as long as possible.

That said, at some point (both in design and integration), you need vision and attention to detail to make progress. The skill seems learnable to me, but watching others struggle sometimes makes me wonder.

Almost nobody has a fully formed idea going into any project or product

That’s the first thing that people need to understand is that this idea of some platonic product or project or tool kit or framework or library or whatever just doesn’t exist and it’s never going to exist

Do you have a specific discreet finite problem that you need to solve so you solve that and if you do it in a certain way you can solve other problems with that same solution sometimes you don’t need it to do anything more than you’re one thing and so that’s all you built but maybe you want to do more than just one thing and so you build it so that has the capability to do it

So yes fully concur it’s the synthesis of attention to detail and large scale

it’s all of the above