Right content, wrong focus? Creation of the World revisited

The first mishnah in perek 5 of Avot is a puzzling one. In English it reads:

The world was created with ten statements. What does this come to teach us? Could it not have been created with just a single statement? But this is in order to punish the wicked for destroying a world that was created with ten statements, and to reward the righteous for sustaining a world that was created with ten statements.

A small puzzle lies in the connection between the world being created with ten statements and God's policy of punishing those who would destroy it and rewarding those who keep it running smoothly. Would God not do the same if the world had been created with one, three or five statements?

But there is a bigger puzzle: why do so many of the commentators on this mishnah spend so much time and effort counting out the ten statements? It is well established that, in its account of the Creation, the Torah states nine times "And God said ...", and that each time these words are spoken they relate to something that He creates. The words "In the beginning", being taken as a statement of creation, make up the total of 10.  In contrast, the commentators spend rather less time and focus on the real message of this mishnah, which relates to God's policy on reward and punishment.

There is nothing wrong in explaining which were the 10 statements, of course -- but the function of the Oral Torah is not to summarise or repeat what anyone can read in the Written Torah. It is to lead in other directions, which is what almost all Pirkei Avot does.

To give a secular example of the popular approach, take a popular proverb, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise". The point of this proverb is that a person will benefit from keeping sensible sleeping hours and this is what we would expect the commentators to discuss. We would not expect them to expend time and effort explaining what is meant by "early" and what precisely constitutes a "bed".