Not the person you are answering to, but I think it's all about the level of abstraction you want to reason at. I didn't grok neural networks until I visualized

Not the person you are answering to, but I think it's all about the level of abstraction you want to reason at. I didn't grok neural networks until I visualized the transformations that were happening in a very simple network. Once that made sense, I could start thinking in terms of layers.