Yes that's my take too. Once you know something well, it's easy to formulate it elegantly to say it's nothing more than the monoid in the category of endofuncto

Yes that's my take too. Once you know something well, it's easy to formulate it elegantly to say it's nothing more than the monoid in the category of endofunctors or whatever, but how something is conceptualized by those who get it has no bearing on how it's learned. A lot of the time, it seems like lots of worked examples without any theory is the way to go until something clicks. All that said, I can't understand why someone would find recursion complicated which probably means I'm unsuitable to teach it.