I think you're correct in your intuition. I recall watching a recent talk by Andrew Ng who mentioned that reading research papers is a key method in improving

I think you're correct in your intuition. I recall watching a recent talk by Andrew Ng who mentioned that reading research papers is a key method in improving as deep learning specialist / data scientist, but that one should temper their expectations of knowledge acquisition. One might spend a Sunday trying to go deep into a paper, but at the end of the weekend that person may barely get much out of it. He even admits that sometimes it takes him a couple reads over a course of several sessions to fully grasp a new concept. Which isn't all that surprising given the information asymmetry between the authors and the reader.