Is hypothesis formulation a skill that can be learned, and how long does it take? I am very lost right now

Per my previous post, I had a very long and candid conversation with my advisor about how he views my progress and any concerns he has about my work. He said there are concerns about passing my qualifying exam in a year. The most (or only) imminent issue is with hypothesis formulation, or identifying research gaps. (Designing experiments and data analyses are not problem for me.) To him, it feels like I don’t seem to get what counts as a good, interesting, and novel research question. Somehow, the papers I find interesting are the bad ones, but the ones I dislike are praised by academia. My advisor said my unique “taste” in research questions is a lack of skills in agreeing with the academic majority. He said the calibration training happens incrementally in seminars and classes when we critique papers, which makes your taste stay in alignment with academia.

I seem to understand why I am behind on calibration, and I am posting here to get a sense of whether I have enough time (1 year before the qual exam) to improve. I had very bad mental health problems in my first year that made it extremely hard to stay focused in seminars and classes, so I basically didn’t get any training in identifying literature gaps. I also seem to subconsciously skip the messy literature review process and come up with questions by talking to people/thinking about something off the top of my head. In my conscious mind, I “did literature review” and came up with a sound hypothesis. I am also drawn to papers with beautifully written math models and don’t really care about the questions they answer. I spent a lot of time studying the theory in the paper and never really practiced looking at the field as a whole to get a sense of what people are doing and what paradoxes that are remaining.

I am a little worried if I have the ability to catch up. That is, I’m not sure if “identifying good research questions” is a skill that can be picked up in a few months. I am able to consistently put in 40-45 hours of focus work every week, and have done so in the past four months. (Unfortunately, I worked in the wrong direction by spending most time on learning math models.) I am also treating my mental health problem and get it under control. I wonder if this miscalibration problem that can be improved by working consciously on this area.