Divide an conquer type algorithms usually lend themselves to naive recursive solutions more often than not. DP usually requires you to find that solution and find some clever relationships that allow you to build up the final solution from the bottom up.
Yes, it's a form of pattern recognition. You can get very good at it and do it mechanically, just like solving integrals.
You can spend a lot of time getting very good at them, or you can just use memorization/rsolve just like you can just use maple or evaluate them numerically for integrals.
Sure there are some problems that lend themselves nicely I already said as much. But in general for an INTERVIEW problem, it as a poor skill to dwell on or even bother testing for since real-world coding is simply not done that way or God forbid what might happen when someone not as capable (but cheaper or younger) has to take over your code base.
We're talking about ACM style search problems that are used for interviews, and not about iterating over an array recursively. For these, the recursive formulation is the naive and inefficient way of solving them.
