All experts in a subject needs an intuition to be extrordinary, instead of being just skilled technicians. This discussion has some more relevance today as artificial intelligence is threatening to invade the cognitive arena. It’s certainly true that a collation of information is powerful, but I doubt that intuition is possible for machines.
Mathematics is something about which I find intuition to be fundamentally important. Without intuition, mathematics is the work of a drudge, something that is achieveable with automatic force. I don’t mean the boring part of the work is not important, on the contrary, the heavy-lifting labour is what separates a mathematician from a math amateur, but intuition is what separates a math genius from a math practitioner.
Humanities study needs intuition as well, which sounds like common sense. But intuition here needs more careful handling, because it can be abused due to its high accessibility. Take literature for example, the essence of poetic work is to influence people by creating emotional fluctuation, which can lead to an excess of intuition for readers and researchers. The job of a professional is to differentiate intuitions and discard most of them. Of course, for mathematics and science, this is also true, but as humanities seem to have a low threshold to let intuition happen, professionals in this field ought to be more careful in choosing the correct intuition to wield.
Or I should more accurately state it as: what matters is the good intuitions. Crudely speaking, bad ones are either true or false, and the true but bad ones are trivial, which wastes our precious time that can be spent with better stuff like idling.