They're not really two separate things because of the way they're taught. They're separate things because they're actually separate.
A fully qualified EE understands circuits at a deep mathematical level.
Analog circuit design is basically a variant of the same theory used to model masses/springs and various other equivalent systems. (Of which there are many.) It's based on diff eqs with various simplifications (specifically the s-plane transformation for simplified analysis and its z-plane equivalent for DSP.)
There are maybe a couple of hundred or so standard circuit configurations to learn with their associated models and properties. The rest can be worked out. But it's essentially undergrad calculus and numerical analysis applied to an unexpectedly large collection of standard configurations which were invented/characterised by researchers with PhDs, often quite some time ago.
There are also specialisms - digital, RF/uWave, component design, data compression and encoding - which have their own lore.
Electronics is cookbook-level circuit design using a small selection of the standard models described with simple pre-calculus algebraic descriptions. It's hugely simplified and watered down. You can get a long way with it, but it's more like LEGO in that you can clip circuits together with only a very superficial idea of how they work.
Anyone who says they can make electronic engineering simple is lying. It's a subset of applied physics, so it's not simple at all.
Cookbook level electronics can be as simple as you want, but doesn't provide a deep understanding of circuit design, or issues like noise, distortion, and RF/shielding problems, data encoding systems, and so on. If you want those you'll need the full course, and that's a lot of work.