[userbinator]

Plenty of people have learned via copy-paste

In my experience, that almost always means "for sufficiently small values of 'learned'." These are the people who can glue stuff together and make something that seems to work, but are completely lost when it comes to debugging or even just writing original code.

[themodelplumber]

In IT there are some absolute gurus who learned that way. There isn't time to do much but Google things, because of the broad assortment of problems that crop up. What you're missing is T, the variable that gives these people the experience to start recognizing patterns in the snippets and building their own original solutions, building their own template libraries, frameworks, etc. You may not code that way, but like I said, people learn differently... Original logic vs. referential logic are like yin and yang; they eventually balance each other out no matter the starting point. You can just as easily point at those who write original code and say they are the ones with the perennial NIH attitude; to whom Googling is a misuse of the human brain, even if it could save hundreds of man-hours.