The idea of "entropy" always seemed to me as a misrepresentation of the actual underlying principle, given a half-dozen other names in scientific literature. Everything reaches the lowest equilibrium state. It's like pouring water into a glass: eventually, all the waves will be gone and it will all settle into the lowest state on the ground. That doesn't really say anything about "order" at all - from the perspective of the atoms, all the "order" is still there. The "messy" vs "useful" analogy also is poor since you can use more energy to make a completely useless contraption (a "messy state") and construct it in a way such that it degrades into a useful one (a bit of a contrived Rube-Goldberg, but still...). Heck, does throwing water into the air and letting it fall into a pond make it "orderly" against the Second Law? That's what the analogies imply. The more analogies that try to compare the Second Law to common experiences like a dirty room, etc., the less people get an idea of what Joules per Kelvin is supposed to mean when they finally meet it in their chemistry book.