Often it's not a matter of more vs less pedantic, but rather how familiar a person is with the subject matter. How distracting a flawed analogy is depends on how familiar the reader is with the topic.

If I say to you "If you work hard at it, one day you too can grow from a tiny shack to a magnificent skyscraper" are you going to go "that's just a loose analogy and I feel motivated"? Or are you going to go "Umm, that's not how that works"?

Some readers have as much familiarity with trees as you do with buildings.