For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
Idk there’s sometimes value in having quantities in decreasing order so you aren’t changing measuring devices constantly and for the sake of minimizing clean up.
For me at least, I like to have everything out and ready to go. My wife writes her recipes as inline directions with NO separation and it’s super annoying when you skim it and find “oh shit, I don’t have any peanuts at all in the house.”
The visualization is less about the ingredient quantities and more about the process I think. I DO find it annoying when you’re using the same ingredient two or three times and they’re is no giant, bold HEY DUMMY DONT PUT ALL THE FLOUR IN THE BOWL RESERVE SOME kind of message.
When I write a recipe for myself I do two columns, ingredients on the left and instructions on the right ordered by logical subsections like “peanut sauce”, and “the roast”. I put recipes on index cards, and also like you suggest, across the very top of the card I always write 3 things: 1. Name, 2. Total cooking surstion, and 3. Grill or oven temperature. So I guess we have more or less the same opinion in retrospect!