"... the psychological profiling of a programmer is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large." * Source: Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth. Dr. Dobb's Journal, pages 16-22, April 1996.

Like I said, it wasn't exactly your words, but it indicates that it might be discussed in that article. Your paraphrased quote would flow nicely

""Don Knuth is said to have said something along the lines that every problem in software can be solved with either more or less abstraction, and that experience tells us which one is the way to go."

So I could see the next point of discussion in that article being about the "experience of the programmer" and him/her knowing which level of abstraction to go to.?

It might be worth checking out the article, I don't have a Dr. Dobbs subscription.

Hmm, it might be that. Although I’d be disappointed if this is really the original quote, because it talks about something quite different from the quote as I heard it (ie. how a programmer thinks, rather than how a system should be built).

Makeshifts last the longest.