No, it's maliciousness, but very specifically aimed maliciousness. They don't want to hurt you, they just want to demonstrate that you are bad at giving directions.

I don't think this a good restriction. Consider the fact that Hanlon's Razor is even a thing:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

This suggests that people often mistake stupidity for malice. So given that in these examples, your opponent probably does secretly understand what you're communicating (most of us know deep down how to sharpen a pencil), it might be necessary to have malice/creativity play the part of inferential distance. Otherwise you may learn to anticipate an unrealistically rational audience, one which never comes in with incorrect preconceived ideas, or lacks the necessary technical vocabulary, or seems to practice selective hearing, etc.

In short, original seeing is the exception, not the rule, so the opponent should be at least slightly hostile in his/her interpretations to account for this.