Protocols need to be defined at the just right level.

Too high and you preclude lots of possibilities.

Too low, and you leave a ton of things to be decided as convention in userland.

That can be great, but then if multiple things in userland need to coordinate they can take less for granted and figuring out how to coordinate might be hard.

In general it's a good idea to have at least a conceptual understanding of the bedrock layers as platonic ideals.

Often primitive archeology is hard because you're trying to post-hoc rationalize a constructed/built object out of an organic, fractal, wrinkled thing... an exercise that is not guaranteed to be possible.

You don't need to expose those semantics to start, but if you have a consistent concept of them that you attempt to maintain wherever possible as you evolve, then you retain the option value to dig down and do easy primitive archeology because you know that there are coherent primitives to be unearthed.