Intuition

So Tom Kyte has a post today: http://http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2005/04/things-you-know.html answering "[how] do you prioritize what "new things" you'll be learning first?".
One of the comments dealt with intuition, and it occurs to me that intuition is what you call 'good guesses'. People always extrapolate based on what they know [or think they know] -- if there's a more fundamental definition of learning, I don't know what it is.
However, are some people better extrapolators than others? I spent a couple of hours today working through a problem with a couple of people. They had been working on a new package for about a week, and were basically stuck. They had tried "everything".
So, here I am, looking at a package that I've never seen before in my life, and, after taking a little while to undo a portion of "everything" they had tried (to set the system up like I thought it was intended to be), we got it working. As I look back, most of the things they had tried were pure guesses, and had little to do with solving the problem.
I don't know exactly what to make of this, or most importantly how to help them pick a successful approach, but that's the challenge right now.