Most mortals, me included, do the initial version the way you did it.
But once you know how useful arrays can be you will use them in your initial code as a matter of course. The code is easier to write and maintain rather than doing masses of typing or repetitive copy/paste/revise cycles to basically repeat the same code over and over.
That helps to visualize the patterns and LATER helps to condense the code.
Rubbish. The patterns are easily visualised with data in arrays and you don't need to go back and change code later and introduce new bugs in the process.