I was able to see how the automation software I was designing would ultimately be an equivalent experience to its manual counterpart and thus be pointless to build.

This reads like common sense but it wasn't; there were thousands of lower level factors. Studying the mechanism of analogy and "sameness" seems to help the mind with abstraction. Perhaps because it is the differences in data which reveal what is most useful to know when creating.

In other words, I think a perspective that can see more of the similarities can "diff" and solve problems more quickly.