I'll give the principles of carbon chemistry and cellular organization; those seem perfunctory to me.
How are these perfunctory (whatever that means in this context)? It does take several years of hard study to get a working knowledge of either. And, after all, living things are chemical in nature.
With zillions of possible organic molecules to choose from, why would anyone expect the abiogenisis problem to be easy? If no working model has yet been found, all one can conclude is that no working model has yet been found.