While the Children of Israel were not yet in the Promised Land they were exempt from the imperatives of real life. The provision of the mannah de-coupled the life of the people from the challenges of scarcity and, for that matter, from the challenges of abundance. As such, Moshe never had to deal with the issues of sheviit and shemitta, whereas he did have to deal with the issues of Shabbos.
In their own way the generation that came out of Egypt lived the life of the ghetto. We call it the life of the nomadic (super)clan but because it was unencumbered by the needs of daily life, it was also sundered from the everyday issues of society. Yitro teaches Moshe how to administer justice because that much had to get done even within the confines of the ghetto, so to speak, but the rest of it, the part that required the inventive imagination of the people at large, was not something Moshe ever had to deal with in the wilderness. Albeit, Moshe had to deal with other challenges but the challenges of life inside the Promised Land were not among them.
Moshe was a ghetto Jew much like the yeshiva world, which wishes to live the life of the ghetto Jew. The Chumash, in fact, doesn’t offer much of a role model for how to conduct the national life of the people once they have occupied their homeland.
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