Thank you for the detailed explanation. In that case it makes sense because it was actually writing or recordkeeping done by a human hand that failed to communicate some pertinent bits of information (though in a more abstract sense than being physically unable to read the glyphs).

Extending it to observations of natural or emergent phenomena seems like a reach for fanciness when "inscrutable," "unclear," "murky," or "poorly understood" would be more accurate to me.

Edit: Upon further review, I am coming around to it a bit, in the sense of performance reviews looking for the wrong thing, but I still think the larger point is about something more complex that poor evaluation metrics are just a symptom of rather than the cause.