[xanmas]

Speaking as the author of multiple academic articles (theoretical physics), I would fundamentally disagree with your assessment. We usually are trying our absolute hardest to communicate a new advance in the field in anywhere from 4-8 pages, references and introduction included. We're essentially trying to sum up (in my case) 2 years of work in as short of a space as possible so, to do this, we assume that the reader has a working knowledge of the foundations of the field but provide references to this. The references serve to 1) provide evidence for unoriginal claims that you make (every sentence that communications an unoriginal result should have a citation) and 2) allow those who are unfamiliar with the field to pick up the basics as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, some of our prose is a bit obtuse because it's reasonably common for scientists to blow off their humanities courses because they're not science -- not realizing that most of our career will depend on the quality of our writing. You shouldn't confuse our incompetence with malice though.

[Xcelerate]

Sorry, I guess a few bad experiences lately have given me in to hyperbole. I do research myself and at least with some of the papers I've read recently, I've noticed questionable vocabulary choices. I can't think of a reason for using certain obtuse words when a simpler word would be much clearer, but as you say, perhaps it is just the word that the researcher thought most apt.

[xanmas]

Don't worry, I felt the same when I was starting to read papers as a graduate student but I came to realize that in cases like the one where you mentioned elliptic modular forms being introduced to vastly overcomplicate something, it was usually done to make something true in a far more general set of space.

For me in physics? That came about when I started reading papers where people were doing stuff with differential geometry on manifolds. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why people would talk about a wedge product when a cross product would have sufficed until about 6 months later when it clicked that doing something in a coordinate agnostic framework allows you to prove things for any coordinate system and create general formulas that just need a few things "plugged in."

I'm not going to pretend to know that that's why elliptical modular forms are being used in your context but everytime something has seemed needlessly overcomplicated, I've come to realize after some thinking that it's done with a view towards generality.

[scott_s]

One's ability to use simple words to describe complex concepts is a function of not just understanding of the concept itself, but also mastery of the language. Consider that many (most?) of the research papers you've read were written by non-native English speakers. In my experience, people who are native English speakers have an easier time being both precise and concise.