[kragen]

I didn't mean to doubt your claim — my limited experience is that proof assistants are totally inscrutable, although I've been inspired by some of the Lean and Agda stuff I've been seeing lately. I just wanted to ask for your perspective, since it's probably more informed than mine!

It seems to me that if you want to formalize the small details, you will necessarily have to do something different with some of those small details, won't you? Maybe a tactic search can find a formal and rigorous proof without you having to write those dozens of extra lines by hand, but simply glossing over them seems like it would defeat the goal of formalization.