> I secretly believe that people heap abstractions after abstractions to purposefully shield the fact that the meat of what they've written is actually quite simple.
It usually is pretty simple, but what they're going for is rigor and concision. Maybe a few papers are overconstrained and could drop a few unnecessary details, but I don't think that's all that common after enough review.
Sometimes people just want their work to sound more impressive than it actually is. Using in-words is a pretty standard technique, their peers don't mind because they speak the same language. To outsiders it sounds difficult. Quite common in academia.
It usually is pretty simple, but what they're going for is rigor and concision. Maybe a few papers are overconstrained and could drop a few unnecessary details, but I don't think that's all that common after enough review.