Are you comparing Stommel's Box model to Bower's recent work? I would argue the latter is more "expressive" though yes, it depends on measurements we weren't collecting in the 60s.
I right read about AMOC back in 1997 while in university. It was fascinating and frightening back then. Still relevant today. It would be sad if it did actually end up happening in my lifetime, but humans are notoriously bad at reacting to bad things that might happening in the future - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons. We tend to only really react once the bad thing has happened.