...which is very valuable. After all, we don't know when, if ever, a satisfactory explanation (by what criteria?) will derive. To defer all progress in the field until it should meet the standards of some other field would be a great loss, and might preclude any number of future further discoveries.
As far as I understand the concept of "science", an empirical observation (including "it works from an engineering perspective, kinda") is only ever an observation. Scientific progress, by definition, involves advancing our understanding of hows and whys.