[yotamoron]

So, just to make myself clear - there are very talented engineers with just a few years of experience, however that's the extreme exception.

As pointed here, it is rare to work on interesting and trail blazing stuff - that's why it takes time, sometimes years, to gain the experience. There's a low probability of actually working on something meaningful, therefore you have to fight it with repeated attempts of finding the interesting stuff - and that takes time. Obviously, time is not the only thing needed to become a really experienced engineer, but - in almost all cases - its a prerequisite.