It should be taught alongside, not in lieu of, other ways of establishing confidence in something. Is a linear model 'better' than a regression developed using

It should be taught alongside, not in lieu of, other ways of establishing confidence in something. Is a linear model 'better' than a regression developed using a tree method allowed to run over hundreds of parameters? The amount of time I've been forced to take explaining random forest, and why we can trust it's R2 more than we can a linear regression is ridiculous.