Oh yes definitely! I agree with everything you've said - I've been tutoring for awhile and I do pretty much all this. In fact, I'm kind of offended that you assume I didn't know this.

In all seriousness, I'm just Still Bad at reading people even though I do my best. The big problem is over the internet through message boards like this. "Are you familiar with __?" doesn't work as well when communication is over these large time scales.

And there's other times, like trying to convince someone of something based in math, but that's a whole other bag of bananas.