I've never heard this characterized so well. There was a <something> that I had always been trying to put my finger on when I'd read these sorts of articles and the top-down/bottom-up description is right on the mark.

My own feeling is something like this. Before Newton there was Kepler. Now Kepler was no dummy and he used the exacting measurements of Tycho Brahe to arrive at a very accurate model of planetary motion. He found that planets traveled in ellipses not circles, and he knew that they swept out equal areas in equal times (among other things). In short, he had a very firm "top-down" grasp on what planets did.

Then along came Newton, a "bottom-up" thinker if there ever was one (calculus was invented in what was perhaps the most supreme feat of yak shaving ever http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html ). He found that there was an underlying and unifying idea, gravity, that explained why the planets behave as they do.

So to cap off my analogy, I've found that if I've worked in a sufficiently bottom-up way on something then sometimes what seems complex or intricate collapses down into some small and elegant solution that I wouldn't have seen if I were coming from the other direction (or at least it would be much more difficult).