Self taught dev here, I completely agree you miss the boring details...at first. One day (hopefully early on) you realize algorithms, data structures, data alignment, etc. are actually pretty important when building larger or high performance systems, or when targeting underpowered hardware. At that point the self-teaching resumes and you pick up all these pieces too.

When I started tinkering with Ruby on Rails I never thought one day, in a different context, I would need to write a hardware-specific, custom binary (de)serialization protocol. Then it happened.