[mikeash]

Someone in another time and place may well find complex word choice and sentence structure easiest to understand in written form, and is wary of writing that uses plain language because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind simple-sounding words and sentence structure.

For you, and the culture you’re in, what you say is true. It is far from universal.

[gonehome]

I guess I don’t agree.

I’d be willing to bet that simpler is generally easier to understand than complex. Maybe some exceptions exist, but I’d suspect they’d be outliers.

[mikeash]

How much do you suppose a person would get out of Up Goer Five if they didn’t already know about Apollo and such?

[gonehome]

That’s fair - at the extreme end it is probably harder to understand.

Though going back to the first comment it’s also not how people talk.