Of course it is Martin, and I appreciate that different people have different approaches to solving similar problems.
But some problems need to have a low level approach to solve, like flattening a road along it's width and smoothing it's length, or getting a wave to break at a certain altitude, or modulating an altitude constraint in a surface layer, or getting clouds or water to animate without ease in out keyframes, or change seasons over a frame range, or create an interesting fractal to change population colours over it's area.
These all need blues to some degree to solve, and some of them are in fact very simple, like the cloud animation discussed in the other thread.
I think working in colour space has far more flexibility than purely using displacements, so an understanding of getting things to work between 0-1 is essential for getting more advanced effects out of TG. Even if you are just explaining what a mask is.
I know it all sounds very dry and off putting, but one of the major attractions of TG is its open architecture, which shouldn't really scare people away. Although working through someone else's logic can lead to very dark places....