What’s an example of a “crucial detail” from your line of work that outsiders might notice but wouldn’t consider significant unless an insider pointed out how/why it was crucial?
Not my line of work, but crucial detail for rockets:
Fluids that people regularly interact with speed up when going through a constriction and slow down when there's an opening, but when a compressible fluid reaches supersonic speeds and then expands, it keeps accelerating.
I learned about this from my dad and for the longest time I thought he had been working on rocket engines in Argentina before he came to the US.
Eventually, I found out he had actually just been designing some sort of jet ejector for a tomato sauce factory.