Modelling only helps if you know what you are modelling, its no use postulating a "pressure sensitive" capacitor - they are, if you can't put quantitive data into the model.

I spent a wasted year at university, where as part of the course we were looking at modelling uwave oscillators and amplfiers, and reached the conclusion that however clever the model was, it couldn't accurately predict the performance of the finished product, or quite often whether the amplfier would amplify and not oscillate and the oscillator oscilalte and not amplify.

To this day I have a deep distrust of modelling as a route to solving any real problem in a system. Measurement sure, but modelling in the absence of actual data is meaningless.

Steve