What the difference between solving images in the wild and stego ctf images?

I've read watched a dozen stego ctf writeups. I thought it would help me decode stego images in the wild. It didn't. Can anyone help?

I used strings, binwalk, exiftool, stegsolve, obscure steganalysis packages, and I've got nothing.

I have a couple images that I know have hidden data in them (did steganalysis on them with multiple packages).

Where am I going wrong?