"The heart of the blues is the blue note, an unexpected minor third. To get that, you need to know what scale you are in, what the third is, and where the half-step is. It's not a complicated idea, but it doesn't come out of the subconscious either."

Wrong. It's more or a less a pure major third, which comes naturally unless you've had it trained out of you by teachers obsessed with equal temperament.

As for 1-4-5 progressions, again they come quite naturally to the ear without training.