Some aspects of this in the culture are disturbingly binary and the world has WAY too many people who don't know the engineering application of A* so they just make something up. Knowing that it exists and has certain (detailed) characteristics is probably 95% of the use. Why didn't you use B* (rhetorical question, whats important is you have an answer not what it is) Folks who don't know path algos probably think I'm making up B* but it really exists and was invented just before I started programming and I have a memory for "new" stuff vs old.
Its useful to have a steel beam and know how to apply it to construction. Knowing how its made and the metallurgy and how that impacts the application levels you up. Then there's a whole sea of lower level construction vocational laborers who don't know steel beams exist and they'll just bodge something together with stuff from the junk yard and when it collapses, well, there's no guarantees in life and it was cheap and the academics never know anything anyway so stop complaining, and last but not least the social butterflies who heard the Jones's next door, who are billionaires, built their wall out of recycled plastic so we'll use that to hold up the roof instead of proletarian wood or even this steel beam stuff.
Its useful to have a steel beam and know how to apply it to construction. Knowing how its made and the metallurgy and how that impacts the application levels you up. Then there's a whole sea of lower level construction vocational laborers who don't know steel beams exist and they'll just bodge something together with stuff from the junk yard and when it collapses, well, there's no guarantees in life and it was cheap and the academics never know anything anyway so stop complaining, and last but not least the social butterflies who heard the Jones's next door, who are billionaires, built their wall out of recycled plastic so we'll use that to hold up the roof instead of proletarian wood or even this steel beam stuff.