Mark Dain
It's probably both. You need to learn how to read the notes, the same way a child needs to learn how to read English but if you don't know English, learning the characters won't help a lot.
Mark Dain
10,000 hours is often quoted as a threshold but I am also hopeless with instruments. My parents paid for Guitar lessons when I was younger and I didn't make any progress. I am also *terrible* at Guitar Hero! However, I used to be as bad at design (you don't want to see some of my ~2008-ish designs. They were shocking) but I've gotten better in recent years. Keep up, you might get better!