Well, I think the hope is that formulae reveal relationships. Notable applications of SR have mostly been to physics and other science phenomena. So, you do some SR to understand the mathematical form of the relationship, and then carry on by trying to understand it causally.
The idea that an arbitrarily large expression is somehow more understandable than the fourier coefficients of a the first few large terms could only have been done by someone who hasn't looked the the vast array of semi-empirical formulas out there which are as clear as mud.