I think a good conceptual foundation is the difference between someone who throws buzzword solutions at a problem to see what sticks, and someone who can make a

I think a good conceptual foundation is the difference between someone who throws buzzword solutions at a problem to see what sticks, and someone who can make a good tweak to get working a standard-ish idea that doesn’t quite work out of the box. Without understanding these concepts it is easy to get stuck spinning in loops on a complicated problem — where tweaking to improve one thing messes with another thing. I won’t claim Bayesian is the only conceptual framework, but I found it particularly intuitive and straightforward — and gives you a lot of flexibility. Refer an earlier discussion on Bayesian approaches a few days ago.