Replying to you but for the OP's benefit. I think you're aware of everything I'm about to write.
This is really an important revelation, I think. A year or so before I started picking up Perl I became faster in a Unix environment than just about everyone at work. It wasn't aptitude as much as comfort (I wasn't scared to try new things), good typing skills, and laziness. Typing orderstat and specstat and friends six thousand times a day was for the birds. Alias o and s afforded one finger typing, and automatic mouse-selection-buffer copy plus one button pasting meant I was faster out of the gate than everyone else. alias pd "perldoc" has been in my .aliases since I learned it exists. I live by Ctrl^R on the command line.
In an age of instant documentation, being an adept librarian/researcher is equivalent to years of training. And having comfort with the tools means that once you find something, you can make it trivial to reuse. One that comes to mind–
alias hs "perldoc -m HTTP::Status | perl -ne '/\A\s+100/ .. /510/ and
+print'"
