Dave was routinely pushing the envelope when it came to these boundaries but many times it was too ahead of its time. The ARTISTS never really adopted the tech until decades later. Some things that I consider really obvious are still not widely adopted. The art here is to understand WHY artists don't want to use those tools and features. Whether or not YOU know math and psychoacoustics, it is more important whether your users can leverage that knowledge without the same knowledge, so being a teacher+performer+producer is very important to knowing your user base

Then you also need to be able to do market research. Asking questions to people and getting solid feedback all the time. As an ENGINEER!! Because it's the subtle differences that add up to a really amazing whole and you cannot know the difference without learning from every angle. To paraphrase you above, 'audio professionals who avoid making music because it looks hard, do not ever reach an acceptable level' and 'audio professionals who avoid talking to lots of musicians/customers because it feels hard, do not ever reach an acceptable level'

... and there are a LOT of people who never do these things

And let's add 'PERFORM music' to this list as well unless you are making a solely intellectual instrument or mixing/mastering tool. Since we're talking synthesizers, this is very, very important.

This is also why the vast majority of music instruments, including software/VSTs, are designed for producers and not performers. Having the set of skills necessary to design a successful instrument is very, very difficult. You cannot be a master of one.

Sure you can 'master' the DSP and signal portion of audio but I can tell you just by looking at the UI almost instantly how much effort was put there vs. making it an enjoyable instrument to play

I can add a lot more of skills I find very important to being successful in this industry but as an engineer, that's what I would focus on first.

At some point maybe I should update my blog with stuff like this

You don't want to read research articles; they are long, difficult, and usually misleading. Books and surveys are easier. You can evaluate the quality of a book by checking the citations: "is this book citing recent articles?" For example, I read a chapter of "An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing" and found it to be useful. I haven't seen a sufficient diversity of books to give an accurate recommendation, however. There may be better books. They'll generally look scientific and dry. For example, "This Is Your Brain on Music", a pop-sci book, will not be useful.

Surveys are where an active researcher talks about what everyone else is doing in the field, and what the important developments are perceived to be.

Experimentation: keep a global goal in mind, such as: "I want to classify all possible timbres and put them on a manifold", or "I want to understand the full mechanics of how a human turns tones into perception". Then you can try synthesizing sounds in pursuit of this goal. Right away, you will find all kinds of strange nonlinearities, and that simple models work poorly. For example, if you hold down sine tones at 400 Hz and 600 Hz, then play an 800 Hz tone, you'll note that sometimes the 800 Hz tone has an attack and sometimes doesn't; this will lead to learning about transients, place vs periodicity, FFR, ITD, and phase sensitivity of the ear. You'll also notice that there is a "click" at the beginning of each note, which will then lead you to discover gammatones, derivatives, and envelopes. This method works because whether your predictions succeed or fail, you are either learning something cool (a mistake in a model) or building something awesome (a great theory).