[SassyGrapefruit]

Strive to know as much as possible but delivery is different from achieving understanding. If your goal is to deliver knowledge is just another tool; it is not some magic answer to everything.

You have to find a balance where you know enough to know you have delivered.

[xg15]

It's an important tool however as it will drastically influence how your solution looks like.

If you have to modify behaviour of a system without understanding it, the approach is usually to apply even more complexity as a band-aid. This will work in the immediate term, but will make your system more brittle and ironically even harder to understand in its entirety.

Also note that black boxes are rigid. If you don't understand what happens inside a blackbox, you can only build around it. However, for a lot of exciting features, you need to modify the black box itself - which you can't do if you have no idea what it does.