Your habit of citing yourself with the appropriate references has led me from taking your stance as an extremely literal one (“understanding all of the layers; literally”) to actually viewing your point as…very comprehensive and respectful to the history of technology while simultaneously rendering the common trope that you are addressing as just that, a trope.

Thanks, teddyh.

Fully understand and “completely able/worth my time to fix” are not identical. I can understand how an alternator works and still throw it away when it dies rather than rebuild it.

In that case, what is the value proposition of investing the time to learn how an alternator works? It surely has some value, but is it worth the time it takes to know it?

To bring it back to our topic, is it worth it to know, on an electrical level, what your motherboard and CPU is doing? It surely has some value, but is it worth the time to learn it?

You’re just saying you didn’t go to school for science or engineering. Plenty of people program and also understand the physics of a vacuum tube or capacitor. Sometimes we really had to know, when troubleshooting an issue with timing or noise in a particular signal on a PC board or cable.