[bradfa]

TI's website is still pretty decent for navigating around and finding the parts that'll solve your problem. ST seems to be making it harder and harder. The former Linear website was very easy to use. Maxim has always sucked, in my experience. NXP has an OK website but generally quite good datasheets.

If you're designing electronics for profit (not hobby), reach out to your local non-stocking distributor (Arrow, Avnet, Future, etc) and ask to talk to the local sales person and FAE. Tell these people your problem. They have contacts at a bunch of semi vendors and the FAE's main job is to know what parts do what. A good local FAE and sales person are worth their cost when you're trying to find what parts to use, even though they get much less useful once you're into the minutia of any given part or design.

Finding good and cheap ways to solve electronics design problems really comes down to experience. Not that you've done a ton of designs yourself but more that you've looked at a variety of ways that other people have solved problems and then tried to understand why they did it that way. Working at more than just one company where you get to do design reviews is a huge help with this. Ask lots of questions at design reviews, challenge the designer on why they're doing things a particular way even if you don't know how to do it better, the designer probably contemplated a handful of ways to solve the problem and will be happy to explain their decision to you. It's also helpful if you can work with a team who are trying to build low volume (<10k units per year) products and a team building high volume (>1M units per year) as there's very different tradeoffs that engineering, manufacturing, and the business are willing to make as volumes change.