My experience was that the visuals were a cool distraction from familiarity with the rules/identities. People always want a shortcut to comfort, and they often

My experience was that the visuals were a cool distraction from familiarity with the rules/identities. People always want a shortcut to comfort, and they often want it to be that a thorough exploration of motivating examples, often with graphics, grants understanding and comfort before facility, but I've always found that a relatively cursory description of the motivating example is more than enough, and after that I just need well-organized reference materials, worked examples, and rote practice. It's frustrating, since it feels like an intelligent enough approach should be able to skip the rote practice, but it turns out that conceptual mastery requires mastery of execution, which requires familiarity, which requires practice. And I say this as someone with very strong intuition, who was always asking why I needed to practice if I already understood, who often grasped concepts immediately - turns out, I still needed practice to understand thoroughly.