Oh, cmon Rob, you know darn well what they mean and they're right: what use are photoshopskillz if all that it means will always be a multitude of (mostly far east) robots that can do it cheaper and better than you anyway?
The trick is to find your signature self. In your images, in your art, or in life in general.
It's been lost in translation or just sloppily phrased by yours truly.
Of course "eye" matters, it's indispensible. My point was that
you have to take that for granted. It's not something wonderful for which you should take credit as if you'd suddenly invented it for yourself. That talent, if you have it,
is your signature self, as you put it.
If you don't have it in you, forget courses for they can't make you see when you're blind, so to speak. I would not equate PS
skills with robotics: their use depends on your own tastes and sensibilities, and the difficulty there is in knowing what the tools can do and how to use them. If they do have a problem it's in that they can permit too much fine-tuning. It's somewhat similar (a darkroom print) to making a song in one take rather than in re-recording and cutting and pasting until all the bits mate properly and in tune. The beauty and curse of Layers, then.
Fats Domino sounds lazy, but it takes talent to do what he does; Jerry Lee Lewis takes Hank Williams music and makes it his own, and for me, infinitely better and more passionate. That's talent. It's already there, inside the soul, or whatever you call the part of you that is sensitive to those things around you.
I think we are saying pretty much the same thing, you and I.
Rob