Some things get called 'acquired tastes', inaccurately. They should be called 'earned tastes', because you have to put in the work to learn them.
The art behind any earned taste consists of repetition and variation.
For years, I thought of Claude Monet as cheesy. The impressionist version of Thomas Kincade. No doubt largely due to the use of the water lilies in every other dentist's waiting room, the freebie calendars businesses hand out at the holidays, you know.
Seeing one of the water lilies in person changed that. He created them at epic scale: six feet tall and 42 feet wide. If you stand dead center at arms length, it fills up your entire field of vision. Like the 19th century version of a VR headset or curved gaming monitor, it is immersive.
And he painted somewhere around 250 of these. But always at sunset, in the same colors.
In his Cathedral series, he switched the restriction, and created transcendant art.
In 1892 Monet rented a space facing the west facade of Rouen Cathedral. Over two years, he painted the subject about 30 times. The same subject from the same angle, but at different times of day, different times of year. On a muggy brown summer's night, and a crystal yellow winter sunrise.
Monet intended through this innovative restriction to capture the essence of light itself. Through repetition, the similarity fades, and what's left is the difference. To do this he employs super modernist technique: following the contours of the cathedral, he builds up paint so thick it makes a sculpture standing off the canvas, so tall it actually casts a tiny shadow on the flat paint behind it.
Blues music has several similarities, which make it an earned taste.
All blues incorporates some restriction. Sometimes it's a limitation of the instrument, or the performer. Sometimes the performer and their instrument are hyper-capable, and the limitation comes from the form – blues without limitations becomes jazz.
Learning how to listen to blues depends on repetition. One excellent method: go through the standards – 'Rollin' And Tumblin'', 'Dust My Broom' – and listen to versions by various artists. The similarity fades, and what's left is the difference. You'll start to feel the personality of each artist emerging from the material.
We take it for granted now, but the layers of paint Monet built as if sculpting were avant-garde and controversial at the time. Likewise, blues music often has a barrier learners need to overcome in its production. Early blues got recorded on early equipment, the sound quality is often terrible by modern standards. And recording conventions were less formal. A performer might give a little spoken word intro before starting a song, or maybe stop mid-song to address a thought. Tuning is not standard.
Programming is an art which requires an earned taste. You largely do the same thing over and over again, that's the repetition. Every time, you do something a little different, that's the variation.
You're trying to separate the similar from the different. Computers are hella good at doing the similar, so the better you can identify the different, the better your program.
But every time you try one thing, you reject all the others. In order to do any one thing, you have to abandon the rest of the universe.
Innovation comes from restriction.