I don't understand the TCP analogy. TCP is incredibly straightforward and scales from a knowledge-required level of almost nothing to very advanced usage like paying attention to ECN markings. Most of the layers above TCP have, over the last 20+ years, had many many problems that related directly to people not wanting to understand TCP, from RMI and similar RPC schemes to things like BEEP/BXXP where the head-of-line blocking problem somehow surprised people.

In the end people working with technologies do need to understand their semantics. I don't mean you should be able to write a competent TCP implementation from scratch, but you do need to understand how the protocol layer makes itself an issue in every layer above it in practice.