You are basically saying you could re-write the H.254 codec just by studying it for one day? Sure you might be able to learn some of the image compression trick

You are basically saying you could re-write the H.254 codec just by studying it for one day? Sure you might be able to learn some of the image compression tricks that it uses by reading the spec but to implement it efficiently requires deep understanding of hardware architecture, instruction pipelines, bit-twiddling algorithms and dare I say it, mathematics. You are right that mathematics is unique in being an infinitely broad subject. Programming as a subject is like medicine in that it is constrained by the real world. However, I don't know about you but I'm not going to trust a radiologist to perform surgery because he's 'understood' the concepts in one day.