>>11646624I think the regular mechanism are just helpful to a certain point. Sure you can use SN1/SN2, radical substitution, elimination, addition and Wagner–Meerwein rearrangement. You can know about protection groups and what directs towards ortho, meta and para. And all about mesomeric effects and typical binding strengths. But in the end it’s mostly just memorizing, especially if we are talking about more than 4 or 5 membered rings. I met people who have an insane amount of stuff memorized, who can tell you about what’s somewhat likely to happen weighting 14-20 factors in, but in the end it’s experimental and like cooking. You don’t really know until you test it. Basically you have to make an educated guess about, how you can likely make it from A to B, meaning which steps you need to take in between. Since if you don’t do that there are almost infinite possibilities to test. But once you thought for some time about the effects might playing into it you start evaluating.
