Well, that was my hunch, which I vaguely included in "cultural connotations".

Luckily, things are slightly different seen from a Finnish point of view. Although, I can recognize what you are speaking about.

But, yeah, for the sake of clarification, I used the term "professional" only to refer to a person who has at least 4 - 6 years of education, and years of experience of working full-time in the field. Then, it is sometimes surprising to see how many professionals actually have very shallow or biased understanding of the field they are working with.