We now bind our physics to our astronomy, but they didn't then. That's what I mean by it being a matter of taste, not of truth.
If you were prompting a godlike LLM for a theory of the heavens in the 1540's you probably wouldn't have used words like "mass" at all, and the theory that it spit out would be similarly absent that concept.
> I don't think Copernicus did any explaining why at all.
But Copernicus's enables us to say more. It is more elegant (it was not simpler though). Copernicus was seeking realism. He was the person annoyed with how complex a system was while everyone around him was saying "who cares, it works".
> That's what I mean by it being a matter of taste, not of truth.
As for your second point, it seems we agree. They're orthogonal. Even if a machine can give you one, the other still needs doing.