[quietbritishjim]

I think my overall point is that symbols can significantly make things simpler, not that they always do. It's very much like the analogy with diagrams that I made in that comment: making things visual can help enormously, but a bad diagram or equation can be as unclear, or worse, than some descriptive text.

Communication is hard, and unfortunately doing it well requires experience and thought rather than simplistic rules like "always use symbols rather than words" or vice-versa.