Right there with you. My wife keeps asking me questions about it and she seems dumbfounded that my relaying of information via research generally ends with "we just don't know how it works".

It seems to me like we've recently (~15-30yrs) had a lot of new technology deployments (and accessibility to the underlying data that's produced) which might considerably help us with gaining an understanding over time. Things like high-resolution, high-precision aerial & satellite radar/lidar/photography and the like.

I tend to think it's just a function of time at this point, but on geological time scales that may still take quite a while I suppose.