Recursive Routing Next Hop Best Practices

Hi All, I recently learned about recursive static routing in my internetworking class at college. I understand that nowadays it is essentially a moot technology thanks to the wonders of dynamic routing, however I am curious as to a couple of things:

1. Why is it against standards to set network addresses (as opposed to host addresses) as the next hop address in recursive routes? For example, if I have a fully defined route to 10.0.0.0/28 and the router for that subnet knows how to reach the 10.0.0.16/28 subnet; why is it standard practice to point a recursive route's next hop to the IP address of an interface on that router, and not to the .0/28 network address itself? I understand that the resolution process ends up with the network address anyway, but to me it just seems cleaner (from a routing table perspective) to point the next hop at the network address and let the fully defined route handle the rest.

2. What is the best practice for defining multiple routes given the above assumption? Using the same example, if the 10.0.0.0/28 router also has a route to 10.0.0.32/28, is it preferred to point the next hop for the route to that subnet straight at the route to 10.0.0.0/28, or can the routes be chained together such that the route to .32/28 is pointed towards the route to .16/28 etc...? Again, to me this feels like a cleaner solution (albeit a slower one, which may be the answer to my own question), but as it breaks the rule I questioned before I am unsure as to which case should prevail.

I understand that these are exceptionally rudimentary questions, so I accept if this post is deleted for that; but I was intrigued as to why this was the standard explained to us by our professor as opposed to handling the routes in other ways.

Thanks!