Literally the day after I wrote this post, an example arose in my French class. In that language, afin de and pour mean "in order to" or "to" (I slept eight hours last night to be well-rested today). Our textbook pulled the exact shit I'm talking about to demonstrate the similarities in usage and meaning for these two phrases. First they gave us a reading about emigrants from France using the phrase afin de all over the place, and many students had no fucking idea what that meant. The following exercise asked us questions about each of the people discussed in the article and then this happened:

Observez ces phrases (Look at these sentences)
Ils ont tout quitté pour vivre une expérience internationale. (They all left to experience an international life.)
Erwan et Stéphanie sont partis en Nouvelle-Zélande afin de devenir agriculteurs. (Erwan and Stephanie left for New Zealand to become farmers.)

a. Pour quoi est-ce qu'ils ont tout quitté ? Et Erwan et Stéphanie ? (Why did they all leave? And Erwan and Stephanie?)
b. D'après vous, est-ce que afin de et pour veulent dire la même chose ? (In your opinion, are afin de and pour the same thing?)

As a teacher, I see what the book was getting at. The first set of questions about each person is to evaluate reading comprehension. Then these are to bring our attention to the grammatical point of the lesson. It quotes two sentences from the reading so that we understand you can use both afin de and pour to create the construction I mentioned above. However most students don't know why books are formatted this way. They answered a set of questions asking why people were leaving France, and then were stuck on question A because it's literally the same one all over again: "Why are they all leaving?" Well, the answer is right there in the quotation. Do I just write the quotation again? Do I take information from the questions asked before from reading comprehension? What the point of this question considering we just answered it? And then they never moved on. It's shit like this that drives me nuts about language textbooks nowadays.