In my own mentoring and team building experience, your assessment regarding juniors and generalists is correct.
Specialism vs generalism is very much a mindset of a person and not strictly dependent on their past experience. I suspect it has much more instead to do with their ability and willingness to build a mental abstraction behind the concrete implementation they have experience with.
To refine the conceit: A specialist will see only the tool, but a generalist will see the way the tool solves a specific problem and get an idea for how other tools can solve it.
I'm being a little hard on specialists here; a good specialist may often have a far more thorough understanding of how to wield their chosen tool and come up with a better solution using it... Assuming they aren't trying to hammer in a screw, of course.
Specialism vs generalism is very much a mindset of a person and not strictly dependent on their past experience. I suspect it has much more instead to do with their ability and willingness to build a mental abstraction behind the concrete implementation they have experience with.
To refine the conceit: A specialist will see only the tool, but a generalist will see the way the tool solves a specific problem and get an idea for how other tools can solve it.
I'm being a little hard on specialists here; a good specialist may often have a far more thorough understanding of how to wield their chosen tool and come up with a better solution using it... Assuming they aren't trying to hammer in a screw, of course.