Yes, and often times theory consciously sweeps essential things under the rug. Take for example physics which postulates frictionless surfaces. That must've seemed like a ridiculous loss of explanatory power. But it turns out that humans can get principles that way, if we blatantly take a huge amount of reality and dismiss it as "friction".

Science really is a different enterprise than engineering. I hear it's fairly recent that scientists had anything to say to engineers and those in medicine. (Now of course science is vital to these enterprises.)