True, I am biased towards mostly-digital systems that keep anything analog-ish (sensors, amplifiers, converters and power supplies, PHYs, RF, etc) at the periph

True, I am biased towards mostly-digital systems that keep anything analog-ish (sensors, amplifiers, converters and power supplies, PHYs, RF, etc) at the periphery, connected via digital buses, where all the scary analog stuff is taken care of by off-the-shelf components or self-contained textbook circuits. But analog electronics is still electronics! > the only way to learn the skill of putting things together is by designing a thousand circuits and building intuition. When it comes to electronics projects specifically, I'd say less intuition and more just learning the rules and conventions; the intuition part is more general. In the job where I got roped into doing the electronics for a pretty complex machine, the design process went (surprisingly) smoothly largely based on skills that I learned doing complex software projects, and somehow found myself translating into a very different field. (Maybe that's just me, though, or maybe that project working out was just a fluke.) Unless you mean "intuition" as in learning the rules until they become second nature, in which case I agree: on that project, all those years of dicking around with breadboards and LEDs paid off.