I don't think it has to be one or the other. Myself, I often get confused by top-down approaches because I obsessively ask about "what's underneath" and feel di

I don't think it has to be one or the other. Myself, I often get confused by top-down approaches because I obsessively ask about "what's underneath" and feel disoriented by arbitrary-seeming machinery. Friends of mine on the other hand get confused when bogged down with details that are "unimportant" to them. It's a really difficult pedagogical task to create a curriculum that's helpful to a large swath of students all at once, and I don't envy teachers for that task.