Three years ago I was training a high school intern on a live console. He had no audio background beyond what he had taught himself at home and what I had shown him. We were working through a virtual soundcheck, playing back multitrack recordings so he could practice without a band in front of him.
The session had a very bright, glassy reverb, and I was using it to teach sibilance. I showed him how compression makes the esses more pronounced, how that reverb was making them worse, and how I would correct for it in the channel strip.
He looked at me and asked, Why not put a de-esser on the reverb?
I stared at him for about 10 seconds. I had been mixing live for nearly 30 years, and it had never occurred to me. We put a de-esser on the reverb, and it worked. Of course it worked. It treated the sibilance where the reverb was exaggerating it instead of taking brightness out of the vocal to compensate.
Studio engineers de-ess their reverbs routinely. I had never carried the idea into live work, and a kid with a few months at a console reached it with one question.
Experience makes you faster, and part of the speed comes from how much you no longer consider. After enough years, the options you ruled out stop looking like options at all. He had not ruled anything out yet.
That moment comes back to me every time we add someone to our team in Houston. New people challenge things the rest of us quit questioning long ago, because they have not learned our assumptions yet. Some of the best ideas I have heard arrived in someone's first few months, and I have learned to listen closely when a new person speaks up.
I have no way to count how many other simple fixes I still walk past because I stopped looking years ago.