I'll have to give up here. My personal experience is therefore colliding with forum experience, and my anecdotal evidence should never be given too much sway i

I'll have to give up here. My personal experience is therefore colliding with forum experience, and my anecdotal evidence should never be given too much sway if so. It's a tricky dilemma trying to work out whether background affects peoples ability to learn rather than their ability to do. An -innate- quality wasn't what I was trying to get at in saying that some people are better at their jobs than others, but I can certainly see the implications. I'll have to think about it... If it helps, my background is from a UK perspective, so a lot of the biases may not be all that similar cross-culture.