This feels, to me, like the complaint of someone with a general technical grounding going into a narrow specialization and discovering they understand none of t

This feels, to me, like the complaint of someone with a general technical grounding going into a narrow specialization and discovering they understand none of the terminology. This is exactly how I felt when I was learning Haskell and hearing about eta conversions and pointfreeness and so on. Each new bit of terminology had a precise definition, but specialists writing primarily for one another were not inclined to offer definitions each time. They didn't need them and neither did their anticipated audience. I had to learn the terminology and jargon so I could understand what they were talking about, and high-level abstracted explanations were not going to be enough to participate usefully. I had to learn the basics. Similarly, Watson & Crick's seminal paper might not have been the best of all possible times to stop and define an X-ray or how crystallography worked. So yes, just instantiate the metaclass, implement the interface, and go buy milk. Easy. You just have to learn what each of those things actually means, especially if the details might be important (and in cryptography, that's always the case).