My suspicion is that we had a sense that generality and compactness was really neat, so we liked easily-remembered laws like F=ma. Applies everywhere, is clean.
When you attempt to hyper-optimize, even with humans in the loop, you end up a mess. You're lucky if you can find clean guiding principles anywhere. If you can hyper-optimize hyper quickly, you end up with an extra layer of mess.
Or that tractable models are just more useful than intractable ones even when the latter are more accurate.