Is good composition something you can actually train, or is it mostly instinct?

i’ve been trying to get better at composition lately and thought i had a decent feel for it.

then i took one photo and tried cropping it multiple times to “perfect composition”

every version felt right while i was doing it… but when i compared them, some were clearly better than others. it made me realize i don’t actually have a consistent sense of what “good framing” is

i ended up putting together a simple version where you try to match a “pro” crop, just to sanity check myself

it’s surprisingly hard to get a high score consistently

curious how people here think about this — is composition something you can actually train like this, or is it mostly instinct?