It doesn't need to. Once you understand that you can edit the xml to get around limitations you learn by experimentation. That's how John learned.

But you only experiment when you have a need to do something. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. I only learned to modify the border in this way because a client had the same intractable design issue. Similarly, I only experimented with the missing options in table styles because I needed to create a single table style that could be used to produce multiple table designs for different purposes by simply toggling the style options.