This is quite often situation when i or my college have to find out specific elements among thousands, or make repetetive work, which is either time consuming and boring.. In this case we have arcpy and pyQt Python libraries for Arcmap and Qgis which can make this kind of stuff for us.

It is been my most common task to do at my first steps in GIS Specialist career - Vectorising water and sewer networks. After many such a projects, i can say you neither need knowlegde of all of components in these systems and how they are working to fully and properly set it up in GIS.