I don't think you understand something until you understand the mechanism.

How do you know when you've "hit the bottom" of a stack of explanations?

When I first learned about curved space and spacetime, I took some of the standard metaphors too literally. I remember speculating that space was a trampoline, but extending in three dimensions rather than two, infinitely thin in the fourth dimension, accelerating (forever!) in the fifth dimension, and of course not actually made of anything. (The acceleration was necessary to make the pieces of matter sitting on the trampoline stretch it.)

Years later I ran across the writings of a crank physicist (edit: I think I found him) whose big idea was that everything is constantly getting bigger (or maybe smaller), and that this explained gravity and maybe some of the other forces too.

Now I see both of these as taking a metaphor too literally because it seems to provide a mechanism. John Baez's Crackpot Index provides

10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".

(This artice by Ronald Merrill, "Sufficient Reason and Causality", is related, though it's been a long time since I've read it.)