[muststopmyths]

so, debuggers are really just tools. To get "good" at analyzing crashdumps, you have to understand the OS and its process/threading model, the ABI of the platform, a little (to a lot) of assembler etc.

There's no magic to getting good at it. Like anything else, it's mostly about practice.

People like Bruce and Raymond Chen had a little bit of a leg up over people outside Microsoft in that if you worked in the Windows division, you got to look at more dumps than you'd have wanted to in your life. That plus being immersed in the knowledge pool and having access to Windows source code helps to speed up learning.

Which is to say, you will eventually "bridge the gap" with them with experience. Just keep plugging at it and eventually you'll understand what to look for and how to find it.

It helps that in a given application domain the nature of crashes will generally be repeated patterns. So after a while you start saying "oh, I bet this is a version of that other thing I've seen devs stumble over all the time".

A bit of a rambling comment to say don't worry. you'll "get really good at it" with experience.