It's very expensive to fittingly defend any conceptions of //real// and //knowledge// in my experience. It's hard to put into words, but I take representations (including what may seem as menial as mental models) made explicit to at least sometimes be necessary though insufficient (and not epiphenomenal) for being a good thinking thing like us. I am worried that some circles do not appreciate the anti-codificationist intuitions about virtue (of a practice) that you are speaking about. At the very least, some rails, footholds, rules-of-thumb, and oversimplified models can provide an accelerated ladder for us, and that may continue even for experts in at least some cases. Without denying the radical value of immersive experience in developing tacit knowledge (nor the necessity of fast emotion for slow cognition), I think there's plenty of room to debate about even the value of crutch-models, compressions, explicitly exploring, story-telling, and codifying instrumental reasoning for even the virtuoso (including with other virtuosos).