@Alex
You're fundamentally right about intuition being important, but what I've learned over the years is that you need a decent basic scientific understanding to slowly extend the area of things on which intuition can work. The more you learn, the better your intuition becomes at figuring out if a new piece of information fits with what you know (and thus could potentially increase your understanding of things via intuition) or if there's something amiss (and the information can't be trusted).
But if can't grasp some really basic things, your intuition will be crap, and there's not enough foundation on which to build a better understanding of the world. If your intuition tells you that 2+2=5, there really isn't anywhere you can go from there.
Also, unfortunately, intuition does have it's limits. You really can't rely on intuition for quantum physics.
@Alex
Can't remember for sure, but I think it was Sargon that argued that what gut instinct or intuition is, is basically your brain processing in the background the information you pick you in your life, and constructing some rough models of the world that can guide you unconsciously. An instance of a gut instinct being your brain telling you if something conforms or not with it's currently constructed model.
By this reasoning, of course the models won't be perfect, but they'll be more than adequate for making quick decisions on things.