Not only does it lend itself well to the imagination, it provides protection against the immersion-breaking reaction that overly-descriptive future predictions

Not only does it lend itself well to the imagination, it provides protection against the immersion-breaking reaction that overly-descriptive future predictions create when they're inevitably wrong. It was really brilliant of him to have the Butlerian Jihad as context for an in-world technology limitations - while also simultaneously showing off a highly-developed and syncretic social structures, especially with the use of religion, to still give it a believable and excitable feel of the future. It gives the book a universe feel that is very hard to re-capture when reading other books by some other sci-fi masters of their era.