I was actually thinking that a decent analogy would be to physics and how you might never really learn much about QCD, for instance, depending on your specialty.

The difference wrt to economists and money is that even most monetary economists don't understand money. What they've learned are a bunch of bogus models about central bank policy; most of which are literally useless at describing an economy with more than one type of capital good. To them, money is nothing more than a convenient denominator for relative exchange rates between goods. The past three centuries of monetary theory may as well not even exist.

Edit: I misread your post and thought you had training in physics. My point was that most physicists don't spend much time learning about the subatomic particles that make up almost all matter, despite that obviously being pretty fundamental for everything else.