I understand how to calculate all sort of useful things that would allow me to design a practical working wing, but I still don't get how it works.
So what do you "understand" the workings of? What allows you to say "yes, I
get that"? I'd wager it's your familiarity that makes you comfortable with assumptions and models in some cases, but not in others (which is the point I was trying to make with bjornhall and the beam-and-ray optics). Subjectively that's fine, but I don't think it's appropriate to generalise your subjective comfort level to an objective assessment of the state of the art.
Are you being serious?
Perfectly.