http://www.popsci.com/einsteins-theo...full-surprises
"That sensation eluded most of his colleagues back then, and it still does.. They study Einstein's greatest insight without fully grasping how he achieved it, or what it meant to him; they typically don't "feel relativity in their bones," in the words of Columbia University theoretical physicist Brian Greene. The lack of understanding comes from a sticky misconception of what general relativity is, even among those who spend their careers making use of it. It is broadly described as a theory of gravity, but it is not just a theory. It is written out as a series of equations describing how objects move, but it is not just equations. General relativity is best thought of as a landscape, both literally and figuratively."

Yes, unlike special relativity, general relativity is "a landscape", or "a classified catalogue", or "a purely empirical enterprise":

https://www.marxists.org/reference/a...ative/ap03.htm
Albert Einstein: "From a systematic theoretical point of view, we may imagine the process of evolution of an empirical science to be a continuous process of induction. Theories are evolved and are expressed in short compass as statements of a large number of individual observations in the form of empirical laws, from which the general laws can be ascertained by comparison.. Regarded in this way, the development of a science bears some resemblance to the compilation of a classified catalogue. It is, as it were, a purely empirical enterprise. But this point of view by no means embraces the whole of the actual process ; for it slurs over the important part played by intuition and deductive thought in the development of an exact science. As soon as a science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms." x

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