Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.
I think it would have helped me if we talked about the motor or other examples first, and then did some math to show how the resonant behavior can be useful.
If you start with easy circuit models, at least the labs can put together something tangible in the first couple semesters, to keep people interested.
And, I mean, a lot of engineering students end up going into sort of technician-y jobs, so keeping the hands-on spark alive has a lot of value, IMO.
The gaps between the analogy and the real world actually make it harder to understand the fundamentals and just confuse people when you get to a deeper level understanding. It requires more unlearning than is worth it for the slight benefit of making the concepts slightly more intuitive to understand at the beginning.
Electricity behaves in many ways just like water (just at a significantly faster time scale) but I don't think it actually helped me learn how it all worked to start with.
Which is why I also don't generally like analogies and the kind
And if you managed to move ahead in hard mode, you shouldn't feel insulted.
Is it an analogy or are both models expressions of some underlying model of potentials and flows, and we happen to have more hands-on experience with water?
Voltage drops across components or look a like head drops across pipe fittings. Losses along a pipe are similar to wires. Head and flow rate are very similar to voltage and current across multiple paths. Kirchoff can apply to both etc.
Many of the quantities have direct parallels and derive from each other in similar ways.
Obviously there are limits. But my middling DC circuit knowledge helped a lot when learning hydraulics from a mathematical engineering perspective.