I've been thinking about this.
Everything looks like a nail, but some people have a more flexible hammer.
If I tried to analyze orbital mechanics using my tool chest of audio engineering, I wouldn't get very far. Heiwa's tool kit of a freighter on the open ocean isn't helpful here, either. But "hard" engineering, as well as baseline physics, are tool chests that do pretty well for most of the technical aspects of the Apollo Program.
And they are probably a good general approach as well. Trying to work out many aspects by analogy to familiar, Earth-bound activities and processes is a poor match. Working from first principles will get you closer -- with the caveat that where the cutting head hits the rotating workpiece there are all sorts of nasty little "technical" details that will foul you up.
The big caution being that they too can be taken too far. The literature of other sciences is full of jokes about physicists who come along and say, "But really you could just reduce the whole thing to this simple equation. Plus some minor variables, of course." And there are plenty of engineers who have decided that Kirchoff Laws are all they need to understand cosmology, and they can get rid of all that messy stuff like dark matter (or even General Relativity).
But way, way back on the other side of the question, about the observer's mind... I have to agree that most artists have some form of it. But it isn't a given. I was thinking earlier about my experiences in the Poser community (entry-level 3d render application specialized towards depictions of the human form). My comment, over and over in chats and critiques, was, "Please go outside and look at real people." Because I saw render after render that failed to understand the basics of how people move, how they sit, how they hold themselves, how they balance, how they express themselves in body language.