In my day, we'd say that as kids we'd take apart all our toys to see how they worked. We didn't necessarily call the end goal "taste"; it was to understand how things work, and to learn which results require which trade-offs.
agreed, tinkering in my experience is either understanding how something works, or fixing something that is broken, or, building something new entirely (and in my mind all of these are hardware based) and usually involves disassembling things into their constituent components, whether or not you're supposed to. I also don't think tinkering is required for taste, I think being exposed to things, exploring things you're interested in, and questioning things is how you develop taste, which is also highly subjective.
