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I think a lot of this is variance across disciplines. I was an immunologist and my impression was that the field wasn't generally overrun with bad writing, or at least not the kind of bad writing that I associate with obscurantism. I just went back and tried to take a fresh-eyed look at my most cited paper (which is now old enough that it is almost fresh to read it again) and the thing that would probably be worst for someone outside the field is the alphabet soup nature of cytokine nomenclature. I don't think there's anything to be done about that though, there really just are a lot of cytokines that have conflicting roles in different contexts, differential regulation that's tricky to understand, and names that all kind of sound that same if they're not your old pals.
Other fields trend to either side of this. If I go pick up a physics paper, I'm in over my head pretty quickly (although not if I go to the Nature Physics website where I'm met with titles like Racial equity in physics education research and Towards meaningful diversity, equity and inclusion in physics learning environments on the home page). This isn't because of the authors putting on a show though, their material really is complex and requires a fair bit of background knowledge to avoid getting swamped pretty quickly. In contrast, the Journal of Sociology is silly, resulting in a more performative approach to the work, such as it is.
I'm sure someone has already done it, but something I've been bouncing around a bit is the idea of irreducible complexity in different thought domains. Some things are complex simply because they really are complex, there just isn't any simple way to understand them that doesn't become lossy. Other things really aren't all that complex, but the people in the profession both benefit from complexity and personally enjoy adding it on (much of law seems this way to me when I look at arguments). This shouldn't be read as saying that people in these fields are stupid - unfortunately, it's quite the opposite, they're clever enough to add many layers of complexity to something that should be intelligible to anyone that's interested.
This is an accurate description of software development for the past 10 years.
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I am sorely tempted to make a "Stop Discovering New Cytokines" meme off the usual template . Interleukins were at their best when they were fodder for speculative Michael Crichton novels.
Accursed immunologists, almost as bad as the geneticists when it comes to bloating up medical textbooks.
My grandpappy never heard of DNA till he was done with med school, and it didn't do him no harm.
shakes fist
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