I think it could sound wrong to the naive because novices generally want things to be simple. They want a few rules, a simple formula, a way to reduce an unknown problem to a known one.

This comes up a lot. The most pithy version I've seen is from Mencken: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." But the same lesson is in the [1] Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, and also in the shu-ha-ri model [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisit... [2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ShuHaRi