> Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems.

I'm the same way. I'm really good a identifying solutions to a problem. I'm really good at identifying the costs/benefits/issues with each of the problems. However, I take a while to get there. I may figure out one (suboptimal) solution quickly, but it takes me a while to pick out a variety of them and identify the one I think is the right one for the current situation.