The way I think about this, there are some aphorisms that work as actual design principles, and some that are just used to defend a decision you have already made to someone who doesn't need to understand it.
"There's no such thing as security through obscurity" is an example of the second; you can use it to mean "shut up and stop asking questions about the secure system I designed," but you can't use it to design a secure system or explain why your choices are correct.
The useful design principles behind "no security through obscurity" are just a little more complicated -- they're more like "every secure system must have defined entropy sources (such as keys) that provide a lower bound on the security budget against a hypothetical attacker with knowledge of everything except for the entropy sources." And, "because obscurity does not measurably improve the lower bound on the security budget, it is only a good idea if it also does not raise the chance of implementation errors, does not make it harder to obtain third party reviews of the system, and does not make the security of the system harder to prove." An argument about whether something is security-through-obscurity-in-a-bad-way probably actually wants to be an argument about an underlying design principle along those lines.
I don't exactly begrudge people using "shut up and trust me" phrases in situations where that's needed, but I think they're almost always unhelpful in forums like this.
"There's no such thing as security through obscurity" is an example of the second; you can use it to mean "shut up and stop asking questions about the secure system I designed," but you can't use it to design a secure system or explain why your choices are correct.
The useful design principles behind "no security through obscurity" are just a little more complicated -- they're more like "every secure system must have defined entropy sources (such as keys) that provide a lower bound on the security budget against a hypothetical attacker with knowledge of everything except for the entropy sources." And, "because obscurity does not measurably improve the lower bound on the security budget, it is only a good idea if it also does not raise the chance of implementation errors, does not make it harder to obtain third party reviews of the system, and does not make the security of the system harder to prove." An argument about whether something is security-through-obscurity-in-a-bad-way probably actually wants to be an argument about an underlying design principle along those lines.
I don't exactly begrudge people using "shut up and trust me" phrases in situations where that's needed, but I think they're almost always unhelpful in forums like this.