I think what you're touching on is complexity and how many people tend to trust complexity because it's too difficult to validate and you must know what you're doing if you built something so complex.

Even in a corporate environment, I use spreadsheets to support big decisions every day, the format is as you say universal and easily interpretable, but many people never go that far. They trust that I did it correctly and take the "output" as truth. If I screw up big ($), it might cost me my job, but is it really my fault if nobody else even bothered to check my work?