An idiosyncratic system that exhibits a discernible anatomy of simple parts that interact with one another in a predictable fashion has the opportunity to be much more robust and almost as quickly understood as a metaphor that occludes the implementation.

In other words: upon encountering a heretofore-unseen object, you are inevitably going to have to learn something. Which sounds like more effort — an object that starts off completely alien but with experience is found to work quite consistently, or an object that starts off familiar but is found over time to belie both the thing it is pretending to be, and the thing that it actually is?