[tel]

This is really natural in mathematics and logic—it's the tension between consistency and completeness.

Essentially, you have a tension between laws a models. A larger number of laws means more reasoning power at the expense of fewer models (possibly 0 in which case you're inconsistent). A larger number of models means greater realizability but fewer laws (possibly 0 in which case you've gained nothing through this exercise).

It's always a game of comparative linguistics—does this abstraction pay its way? Well, without it we have this set of laws and with it we gain this new set. Are things in balance such that the abstraction is realizable and the laws are meaningful? That's your tradeoff.