[PeterStuer]

It depends. Some people most certainly grasp things better if they are concrete, grounded in their perception of reality. For others, they see each 'example' as a mere partial projection at best that completely fails to capture the true essence of the abstraction.

That said, in sloppy engineering we often see the reverse. 'Here's a meta-model I cooked up overnight. Now if you spend the next 3 years gathering all the domain knowledge and expressing it in my nifty notation, you can have the outline of a potential candidate for your question. I'll write up a journal paper tomorrow about how I solved your problem'. There was a lot of that around when I was in academia.