A big part of the difference could lie in how we perceive. A quote: "intuition can beat analysis, because your unconscious mind excels at pattern recognition. If you stop and take the time to think, it is easy to lose the forest in the trees." Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Chpt. 2). I wonder how much ABXing evescerates by over analysis that unconscious pattern recognition experienced persons have.
Anybody interested in perception vs measurement issues ... which includes a lot of Head-Fi-ers obviously .. really ought to own and study "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.
The human brain does excel at pattern recognition. The
fast-firing subconscious brain is fast because it
maps a few points of similarity in the current situation to its store of experiences,
and basically extrapolates the rest of the detail from the past over the present.
This is an evolutionarily excellent
response for dealing with (for example)
possible lions lurking in the tall grass. But it also has a
high (and often invisible) level of error compared to rational analysis. Kahneman explains it far better than I can, and with proof by experiments to support every bit of it.
If you only read one book every five years, this should be your next read. It's that good, that informative. It will change how you think about your thinking, give you an increased understanding of the baked-in perceptual biases that we all have due to how our brains work, and how much (and when) you trust your instincts.