I feel your pain. Academically I was going into research and ended up leaving for tech. I often wonder if Im to much of a dilatante to develop deep understandings. I did have a professor who I liked who talked about depth and breath. This was a bit of a meta class around writing a doctorate and she was like yeah your paper needs to delve into the specifics of the research but needs to tie it back into the field in general and you have to maintain a broad understanding of the field.