I know I might be in the minority, but this kind of stuff doesn't bother me at all. The silly abstraction is essentially there to highlight which part of the p

I know I might be in the minority, but this kind of stuff doesn't bother me at all. The silly abstraction is essentially there to highlight which part of the problem / lesson you should be focusing on, and to stop you from going off on a tangent and getting bogged down in the gritty details. Going with your exotic particle example, once they've framed the problem like that, there's an implied expectation of reality and correctness which is likely going to be missing from an introductory example.