[rimantas]

  > Estimation, intuitive reasoning, analogy, pattern
  > matching, logic, etc.

Alas, most of the things on your list require a pretty solid foundation to work. You need patterns already committed into your brain to do pattern matching and to see analogy, you need to have internalized experience for intuition to work, you need to have previous exposure for any meaningful estimation. All to often people forget foundation when they move to the upper layers and sadly sometimes this leads to thinking that foundation is not necessary. And now matter how you look at it there will always be bits of the foundation that require rote learning.