[mechanical_fish]

True, but one of the things an expert is expert at is knowing how to communicate with new clients and ask the right questions.

The expert often knows how to communicate more effectively than a non-expert would anticipate, because she has seen all the common issues before. That's what expert means. When a non-expert encounters a problem for the first time it always feels like a uniquely strange and complicated new thing. But more often than not an expert will listen to you describe your problem for two minutes, reach into a drawer and pull out a standard design that fits 85% of your use case, adjust the settings on the five standard knobs to cover another 10% of your use case, and then focus on the remaining five per cent... or, perhaps, just deliver the solution to you and let you tinker with the remaining five per cent.

It's hard to appreciate this process until you've been through it several times in different contexts. Because one of the things that non-experts are not expert at is: Knowing what the experts can do for you. Telling the difference between a problem that benefits from lavish amounts of personal attention and one that can be solved in ten minutes by someone for whom your problem is a daily routine and who knows just what to ask.