To be fair, you inherited Eno's world. This is a recent article but it reflects his thoughts from the 1970s and if you look at music and the charts back then you'd see a lot of very structured 'top-down' approaches and that's how I imagine music was taught back then. Even 'freewheeling' folk, rock, and psychedelic music followed pretty simple patterns.

The problem is when guys like Eno talk, we dismiss it as a little obvious and perhaps a little old fashioned, only because we're so much past that and largely due to guys like him. A bit like reading about what computer geeks were excited about in the 80s and chuckling a little how simplistic or ordinary it seems now. Back then, it was cutting edge thinking.