Photo Data Makes It A Snap To See What They Did

Knowing things like ISO rating, shutter speed, aperture, focal length etc. won't help that much. Not unless you can see the original scene with your naked eye under the original conditions. Then, and only then, will you be able to work out how those settings affected the scene.

Focal length in particular can be misleading unless you know that what you are looking at is the whole of the frame. And of course that the exif data helps you (through the camera model) know the frame size.

But worse still for those trying this technique, most pros do at least a little post processing. This means that there's a lot more to the final image than the simple exif data might suggest.

However the biggest problem here is that the most important thing about a good photographer is that they have "the eye" for a great image. No amount of technical expertese will compensate if you don't have the eye.

Firefox users can simply install the FxIF extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxif/). No need for all the extra programs just to look at some embedded data...