Yeah, it's hard to compare abstractions made for different audiences. Working in Scala I use applicatives all the time, so if you show me something and tell me it's an applicative then that's a lot more useful than giving me the details of the operations it has. But obviously to someone who isn't used to them talking about applicatives seems like it's just adding another layer of indirection.
Part of designing a good abstraction is the interface communicating usage and intent, which should be tailored to the problem domain and the audience.