Comment by __MatrixMan__

I've only taken three (undergrad) classes involving groups so I'm far from an expert but my feeling is that their underlying structure is a bit like prime numbers.

Nobody bothers explaining why the primes are spaced like they are, rather people explain other phenomena by pointing out that certain things about it are prime or not.

For instance, there's this thing about having a nice neat formula for factoring second degree polynomials (the quadratic formula). One also exists for cubics and quartics (though they don't usually have you memorize these) but none exists for quintics. It took mathematicians a while to prove that such a thing doesn't exist (how to prove a negative?) but they managed it by arguing that all such things have an underlying finite group smaller than a certain size and look, we've listed them here, and there's no such group corresponding to a quintic formula, therefore there is no quintic formula.

So they're useful as a sort of primordial complexity that can be referenced without extensive explanation since properties about the small ones can be checked by hand. And as it turns out, quite a lot of things form groups if you bother you look at them that way.