A anecdote along the same lines as your drawing vs constructing observation:
I happen to be fairly adept at wood working. And I often think up novel constructions that people quite fancy and indeed are willing to pay their hard earned bucks for.
Once I have thought these things up, I am able to render them to paper/CAD very easily for concrete plan creation. I am never surprised at the appearance of the thing when it is rendered to CAD, I always knew that’s what it would look like. I never saw it in any visual sense, but I knew exactly how it would appear, and I could answer in great detail any question someone might have about it (barring, perhaps, the sorts of questions that require trigonometry/excessive number crunching – the reason I’m putting it to CAD/paper).
To me, this means there isn’t a binary “has ‘imagination’/does not have ‘imagination’” divide. Rather, folks perhaps have different methods of “visualization”. Some folks have a “bitmap” approach (≈Photoshop). From the comments here, it seems some a “vector” approach (≈Illustrator). I would perhaps describe mine as a “CSG” approach (≈OpenSCAD/Grasshopper/etc.).
What’s nice with this phrasing is that nobody is missing anything. Nobody is a-trait. Everyone just has a different method of doing the same sorta thing, perhaps with some relative strengths and weaknesses accordingly, but no fundamental lack of ability to answer any particular question.
But who knows, maybe that’s just cope.