I used to do bench top work too; and was blessed with “the golden hands” in that I could almost always get protocols working. To me this always felt more like intuition than deductive reasoning. And it made me a terrible TA. My advice to students in lab was always something along the lines of “just mess around with it, and see how it works.” Not very helpful for the stressed and struggling student -_-

Digression aside, my point is that I don’t think we know exactly what makes or defines “the golden hands”. And if that is the case, can we optimize for it?

Another point is that scalable fine tuning only works for verifiable stuff. Think a priori knowledge. To me that seems to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from “mess with it and see what happens”.