Empirical approaches and underlying theory are both valuable and should be used together. Abstract theory is useless by itself. Hell, simply writing a program

Empirical approaches and underlying theory are both valuable and should be used together. Abstract theory is useless by itself. Hell, simply writing a program to accomplish some specific goal is an empirical exercise that further enriches existing understanding. Of course, as you note, empirical guess-and-check knowledge with no theoretical understanding is also a problem.