I think it's a good lesson to learn, in general, that intuition and popular choices are often wrong or at least sub optimal. But I suspect that the popular sub-optimal path is taken for pragmatic reasons. More specifically to teaching, I have recently being putting together lesson plans for coding/robotics workshops and I suspect part of the reason for a less experimental experience is that it is easier to plan than a less on-rails teaching experience. This makes me think that at least part of popular wisdom is simply that the sub-optimal popular choice might be good enough given insufficient resources to implement the truly optimal choice.