The Ericsson's research was aimed at fields that were not changing a lot: athletic performance, chess, classical music instruments. I think what it's documenting is how much deliberate practice is required to re-wire your brain to allow for unconsciously expert perceptions and performance. That's the inference I make reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409696 and these two sentences from the concluding paragraph in http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...
"...the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982). Experts' knowledge is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant."
"...the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982). Experts' knowledge is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant."