You probably did all that, just below thw surface. IT's hard to follow a concious decision-making protocol when you don't actually know what the problem is, after all. When the solution clicks into place at the same time you figure out the problem, you must have been working on it somehow.
That makes sense--and now that I think about it, the writing decision has been brewing for awhile, at least since a very smart agent suggested in a Q&A session several months ago that I consider historical women's fiction. I resisted the idea, because to me "women's fiction" suggests either chick lit or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, self-consciously literary stories about women's life stages where nothing much actually happens, not the Girls' Own Adventure Stories I naturally seem to write. But I suppose on some subconscious level I was thinking, "What if I can write romantic stories without them being romances per se?" and it all came to a head when I realized the wip is likely to be 25-50K words too long, and that if I follow the romance rules I have to leave out or gloss over too much that matters to me.
But still. While I can't deny the existence of things like epiphanies or love at first sight (I knew the day I met DH that I'd marry him), my inner Vulcan still frowns and tsk-tsks over how illogical they are.