Also, I observed that as you get more and more experienced, intuition ("hunch") works surprisingly well. It's not always reliable and sometimes it's just plain wrong though.
On the other hand, I don't see how you can keep experience and intuition from being a factor in any instance of the scientific method.
Yep, and in my experience this can result in wasting huge amounts of time. I've lost count of the number of times I've followed my intuition down some rabbit hole, and several hours later found that the issue was something totally unrelated. This usually happens when I've been coding for a while and am tired. :)
I try to do something like "follow intuition, but with a timer started". If following the intuition fails to bear fruit by the time it "should", I start to question if I'm on the right track.