"The reason why I harp on organic chemistry as boiling down to "nucleophile attacks electrophile" is because it's a greatly simplifying way to look at chemical reactions. After you've done organic synthesis for awhile, you start looking at functional groups like they were really complicated pieces of Lego: while their shape, size, and colour may be different, the principles which govern how they fit together are the same. The way I look at it, nucleophiles are like the little nubby bits that stick out of the top of the blocks, and electrophiles are the empty spaces on the bottom which they fit into "