Programming for 2D game artists: copy this text that does some cool stuff. It does some cool stuff! There you go, then.
As I think others have pointed out on this series, it still just seems like magic. Sure, hitting it with a hammer is easy, but knowing where to hit is the art.
I've since forgotten how I managed do make them, but I think that's largely from a lack of practice.
I think that it seems like magic to us because our brain refuses to believe that it is that simple. But specially because we lack the practice. After much practice eventually a threshold is reached and the brain decides that you've been exposed to enough patterns and nothing else is left to learn and that is when "it just clicked" happens. At least that is what I think is happening. Your brain is protecting you from claiming you've learned something new without enough practice.
These tutorials are the end result of a lot of invisible rule-breaking (a nose looks like x, a hand looks like y, etc.). You can't break these rules intelligently unless you know what they are. And since everyone has access to reality and a pencil, there's nothing preventing anyone from discovering the rules.
I agree with you as far as the experience and the analysing of shapes goes... and yes... the next step after reading the tutorials should be to go and play with the shapes and create something new, experiment and find your own way of doing things. From some of the feedbacks I received that is happening for quite a few users that go through the steps and then turn the simple circles into an owl, a tiger or a dragon. Something they would not have created from scratch with pen and paper as they lacked the self esteem and believe in their art creation skill.
I tried to go a different way in the tutorials to give the readers a simple approach towards 'constructing' elements from basic building blocks - rather than struggle with perspective and proportion.