I wonder how much this is personal bias. I'm self-taught but I have absolutely no idea how I perform on the bell-curve against formally trained software develop

I wonder how much this is personal bias. I'm self-taught but I have absolutely no idea how I perform on the bell-curve against formally trained software developers. From personal experience I've had to spend time learning concepts that I "ran into" that others already knew about. I probably spent a lot of time thinking I was good and clever enough to solve challenging problems... but then realize that I had used inappropriate data structures and made things more complicated than they needed to be because... I hacked my way through the problem rather than think through it from solid principles. While I personally think experimentation is great... I've come to the conclusion that a mix of the theoretical and the practical is best. Being able to go back and forth between the two extremes has been valuable to me.