I think your assumptions are fundamentally wrong. The examples of repetition you describe are specifically designed, whether by a video game producer, a musician, or a priestly class- to feel important and be generally pleasant. Video game creators spend thousands of hours researching the best ways to turn their systems into Skinner Boxes, priestly sorts have spent untold amounts of time preparing sermons to instill a sense of the criticality of religious ritual- in other words, no, humanity doesn't like repetition in and of itself, but it designs repetitions that it does like.
Meanwhile, that dual sense- the pleasure the video game designer tries to create and the sense of importance the priest creates- these are fundamentally absent from our teaching methods in early arithmetic, which, at least in America, we call 'math,' not differentiating the symbolic thought processes from the repetitive arithmetic, incorporating little if any fun, and constantly failing to appropriately create a sense of importance (the most common teenage question in math classes is, "Why do I have to learn this? When am I ever going to use this?").
While there Do exist efforts to instill a video game's sense of fun to arithmetic exercises and a sense of near-religious importance to the symbolic thought of math, we are functionally applying a tourniquet to the mathematical understanding of the young by just force-feeding arithmetic drills and emphasizing mistake avoidance instead of proper thinking- and it's very little wonder that only some few students' mathematical passion survives the tourniquet.
Yes, of course people don't like repetition per se abstracted from the particulars of what it is that is repeating. Someone likes repeated palm-muted metal guitar riffs; but thinks that someone else who likes knitting sweaters, loop by loop, should get a life.
Meanwhile, that dual sense- the pleasure the video game designer tries to create and the sense of importance the priest creates- these are fundamentally absent from our teaching methods in early arithmetic, which, at least in America, we call 'math,' not differentiating the symbolic thought processes from the repetitive arithmetic, incorporating little if any fun, and constantly failing to appropriately create a sense of importance (the most common teenage question in math classes is, "Why do I have to learn this? When am I ever going to use this?").
While there Do exist efforts to instill a video game's sense of fun to arithmetic exercises and a sense of near-religious importance to the symbolic thought of math, we are functionally applying a tourniquet to the mathematical understanding of the young by just force-feeding arithmetic drills and emphasizing mistake avoidance instead of proper thinking- and it's very little wonder that only some few students' mathematical passion survives the tourniquet.