[josephschmoe]

|Discussions about which design is better are pointless to me. Why don't we just try both and let the data decide?

This seems to indicate to me that you are stuck in the "expert beginner" phase of development. That's bad - but it's not necessarily your fault. And you're obviously making moves to try to escape this trap.

What you need - or at least what worked for me - was going out of my way to learn as much as I possibly can about the field I'm interested in, and even accepting that I might need to re-learn some things or reconsider some of my notions (for me, the biggest one was my low tolerance of messy code and extreme sense of organization - I worked on mastering refactoring tools to make it easier to fix messy code quickly if I need to, so I've given myself a higher tolerance for writing it).

I don't mean this badly. I'm still an expert beginner in plenty of things - it's just important to be humble and try to escape it so you can get some perspective. Perspective isn't something your environment will probably give you, you need to make it for yourself.

http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of...