Question To All.....

You could apply this notion to the whole of any game. Rephrasing it as, "Is it better to have more internal mechanics and mathematics transparent, opaque or translucent to the player?"

In the case of this game, it is rather translucent, in that players have access to enough basic numbers that reverse engineering the game mechanics isn't a huge stretch. However, not all mechanics are laid out transparently, so theorycraft does become involved. In the end, players have the natural tendency to break down, test and analyze components of a game so that pure opaqueness doesn't really occur in any situation.

Q u o t e:
The answer is, transparent is always the best.

Liked your reply, but might not entirely agree. In various elements of game design, some decisions are philosophical decisions which are translated through math into arbitrary numbers. There is no 'right' answer and in cases like that, you open up an unresolvable debate between players and players or players and development. It creates more frustration and misdirected anger, because it can come down to a matter of opinion. This is where obscuring things can assist in the immersion of the game, as that is what is most achieved by making a game's mechanics obscured.