I'm the same way, and it makes me feel a little sad to think about it, and even more sad when I try futilely to get back to that same understanding only to realize so much of the mathematical foundation required to understand them vacated my brain long ago as well. I suspect a lot of EE majors who actually bothered to really understand them at the time feel the same way.
Do you remember feeling like you used to love what you do because of that sort of understanding and the ability to observe it in the world around you? Pepperidge Farm... er... perldigious remembers. Successfully bringing a practical design to fruition is a good feeling, but it only took me a few years out of college to figure out that the bulk of my career as an EE would instead be spent doing tedious paperwork, dealing with corporate bureaucracy and politics, and constantly trying to appease various members of $management who often have completely conflicting goals and nearly all of whom ultimately only have the goal of staying in power or acquiring more.
That last link is sort of long, but it's very good and he ties everything back to business and the general world outside of politics at the end. My friend sent it to me when I was lamenting to him that, "I just want autonomy, freedom over myself, and I just don't get why the overwhelming majority of people in the world seem to want authority over others. So yes, I do have an 'authority problem', the authorities in question are just framing the problem differently than me. If one of them tells me to jump off the building with nothing but an umbrella to break my fall, I'm going to insist they 'lead by example' first to get my 'buy in'."
Just another Perl hooker - My clients appreciate that I keep my code clean but my comments dirty.
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Do you remember feeling like you used to love what you do because of that sort of understanding and the ability to observe it in the world around you?
Yes, as a programmer (for fun & profit) I sometimes do think that something could be solved/eased by programming. For example, I was filing a form at a branch office; data from that form would be entered by hand to be transferred to the main office. Reply to my question of why not add required software & network to do this was that status quo gives local branch more control; there is nobody hovering around.
In some other instances, I often think that installing a programming environment (& learning whichever programming language) would make life of otherwise non-programmers (or, "I am not a computer person"-people) much easier.
When I was involved in (amateur) photography, I was nearly always finding if a image would be better with this perspective or that angle; fully open aperture or 1-2 stops down, etc. Also, somebody's image could have improved by just a bit of editing (increase in contrast; cropping; etc).
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