I'm a great fan of the going from first principles - but I think it and your post ignores one big part of the reason for design by analogy. A lot of error/bug

I'm a great fan of the going from first principles - but I think it and your post ignores one big part of the reason for design by analogy. A lot of error/bug fixing is evolutional and this knowledge is built up over time through the userbase and design team. You see this in software projects where there's always the temptation to start from scratch, but once in this process there's inherently a lot more bugs and quality control becomes an issue (even though the old clunky system feels low quality, functionally it can be expected to be reasonably error free).