Part of it is knowing the tools. In this case, 'stat' is the command you probably want to get parsable details about a file, not more options to 'ls'. I often see convoluted shell scripts that could be a lot simpler with the use of more appropriate utilities.
It's just an example. With shell-friendly outputs you can recreate "ls -l" with any field order you want with just a few lines of readable shell script. Many of the unix tools only exist because it's so hard to parse the human-readable output in the shells.
