[b_emery]

Your advisors were acting in your best interest. There is a time and place for readable science, and your thesis is not it. It has nothing to do with the power of the guild, and everything to do with assessing your knowledge and preparation.

The purpose of your thesis is to demonstrate to them (and perhaps the larger scientific community) that you can communicate to other scientist in the language of the field, that you possess the requisite knowledge, and that you are prepared to advance that field.

There is no guild, but there are gate keepers (reviewers of various sorts) and you must be prepared well enough to make convincing cases (for publication, funding, etc.) Your advisors were training you for this role.

[jacquesm]

Well, so sorry. If things are as bad as you sketch them then there may as well be a guild.

Science is first and foremost about understanding, and writing in a way that purposefully obfuscates and makes it harder to understand what is communicated is anathema to true science.

[b_emery]

You misunderstand the purpose - it's not intentional obfuscation. Its the lingua franca of the field. A technical term can define in one phrase an entire concept that would be tedious to spell out each and every time. It can define one 'chunk' that you can then combine with other chunks to develop deeper understanding. Surely you can agree with that?

While I fully agree that ability to communicate science to the general public is incredibly important, the thesis is not necessary the place for this. Plenty of other places are (blogs, twitter, etc) and this ability is crucial for a publicly funded scientist. General large conferences that I am aware of often encourage non-technical translations of abstracts.

[TeMPOraL]

I don't think that's what 'jacquesm is talking about. It's not about the technical term that can communicate a lot of meaning in few characters. It's about constant use of obscure technical phrases that communicate the same or less than a plain-language description, except you have to work to decipher it. It's obfuscation, in a sense similar to what a JS obfuscator does to readable code.