>I've always thought that accounting is arithmetic made difficult

It basically is. The fact that operations like "debit" and "credit" behave differently based on the sign-convention of the account is legacy baggage that should have been done away with a literal millennium ago. The whole situation is as absurd as if physicists decided that the concept of a "negative" voltage was a bad thing so KVL was formulated as sum{delta_sources} = sum{delta_loads} instead of just sum{delta_voltage} = 0, and then people had to memorize under which conditions circuit elements were treated as sources instead of loads, and when anyone questions why it's all so confusing they just get told that's the way things have always been done.