Yeah I felt the contradictions here too. Doesn’t the feeling of “magic” directly proceed from abstraction and non-tractability (or at least, as you say, not needing to understand every part of the system)?
I agree that the "magic" feeling involves abstraction from nuts and bolts, but a kind of notable responsiveness to, say, preferred trains of thought that are optimal for a workflow or project management or for rich functional interaction. I use the word "liminal" in the sense of the aesthetic term "liminal spaces" to indicate a presence of a kind of lightweight logic not necessarily fully articulated.
