Abstracting, yes, but I don't know about building-upon. The thing is, a lot of this stuff is still sitting around beneath the covers, and someone needs to understand it.
Even worse, sometimes there's stuff that's abstracted over that's important, e.g. if the Excel or 1-2-3 teams had known about Field/Group/Record/Unit Separators, would they have ever come up with CSV?
Or the fact that SYN can be used to self-syncronise, due to its bit pattern …