For sure, you occasionally run into some obscurantism, and that’s problematic. In my field, bad writing is usually just from people not writing in their native language.

But look, you have to acknowledge, some stuff is just hard. There is often just an unavoidable barrier to entry. I think behind a lot of this sentiment is the assumption that academics are just twiddling their thumbs for 10 years through undergrad and grad school, and anyone should be able to walk into the kind of conversations they’re having after all that. I mean, most of the time, not really. We go a learn a bunch of stuff and our colleagues learn similar things, and we then assume a common framework and some common knowledge, both of which are generally not widely available to the general public.

Where I got my PhD, we all had to write a lay summary of the thesis. It’s good they made us do it, but we always used to laugh about it. There’s usually too much assumed background for a useful lay summary to even be possible. You just end up with a very vague facsimile of a summary of the type of thing you’re doing.

It might depend on the field. I have no doubt that the average paper in my field is unavoidably going to be pretty inscrutable to laypeople, and that’s mostly fine. Maybe in some other fields it’s more avoidable, somehow, but again I’d have to imagine that if people are spending their time productively in the academic system they’ll have picked up a bunch of background mostly unavailable to most people.

As a PS, there’s also something weird to me in general about people thinking that they know how to do other peoples’ jobs better than them. See it all the time with retail, planning, media etc, people can’t seem to fathom that things may be the way they are for good reasons that they aren’t privy to.