[HarHarVeryFunny]

> The process of breaking a complex problem down into the right primitives requires great understanding of the original problem in the first place.

Yes, but with experience that just becomes a matter of recognizing problem and design patterns. When you see a parsing problem, you know that the simplest/best design pattern is just to define a Token class representing the units of the language (keywords, operators, etc), write a NextToken() function to parse characters to tokens, then write a recursive descent parser using that.

Any language may have it's own gotchas and edge cases, but knowing that recursive descent is pretty much always going to be a viable design pattern (for any language you are likely to care about), you can tackle those when you come to them.