The former one may be more clueless, but offers 100% ferocious defence without attempting any reasonable attacks of his (or her) own.
You can sort of see how progressing to the next step - from white to blue - is an inevitable setback of sorts.
Funnily enough, this phenomenon vaguely makes me think of the "trough of disillusionment / slope of enlightenment" syndrome (the hype cycle)
It's possible to beat weaker players more efficiently, but it requires consciously "playing down" to set simple traps and grab materiel quickly. Otherwise, a clueless opponent will disrupt "sophisticated" plays by accepting losing trades and ignoring threats. It lowers their chances of actually winning compared to a better player, but pushes the game towards a drawn out chase.
And yes, I think there's certainly some truth to the hype cycle comparison. They both remind me of the "four stages of competence", where people in the middle two stages of "conscious" execution can be slower and more uncertain than either trained or untrained instinct.
The typical approach that I also follow is that when I want to practice some technique I'm not well familiar with, I try it on white belts first, iron the obvious wrinkles out, and then I keep on going up the skill ladder until I'm able to execute it on my equals.
As I practice it against stronger and stronger opponents, I'm correcting increasingly subtle errors (that they're capable of using against me, while I could get away with them against weaker sparing partners).
It would be more difficult to try new stuff against someone of equal skill straight away, it makes much more sense to work your way up gradually.
It's obviously a physical, but still highly technical sport - and I imagine the same may hold true for many competitive activities.