[kitchi]

Academic writing is surprisingly hard. Distilling months or years of work into its essential ideas is almost as challenging (for me anyway) as the research itself.

Often it forces a clarity that only comes from writing ideas down in a way that's necessary to explain your results to your peers.

The process itself sucks, but the outcomes are often quite satisfying and rewarding.

[jvanderbot]

I admire the old papers. "In this manuscript we derive XYZ from ABC and show that EFG still holds" followed immediately by something akin to "We begin by showing ... "

Nowadays the intro/motivation/problem statement / related work (citation tax) / formulation/<actual results> / simulations / conclusions / futurework format is just soul crushing.

[jltsiren]

Old papers were essentially essays. When there were fewer researchers publishing fewer papers, you were expected to read everything relevant you came across. It made sense to optimize the papers for reading.

Today there is much more research being done and published, and fully reading a paper is a special case. Papers are now more structured, and the primary use case is quickly skimming over the paper to determine if it merits more thorough reading. (Usually it doesn't.)

[bonoboTP]

In math they often still skip those motivation, related work overview stuff and just do some math.

But I actually do think it's good to force people to think about the "why" question a lot.

[jvanderbot]

Maybe! But also maybe niche research can just be for the niche researchers. The work is funded, and therefore the "why" hoops have been jumped through, right?

And anyway, aren't reviewers themselves supposed to be able to connect dots?

When I was an active reviewer I tried not to ever say "Who cares" in so many words and just focus on the technical contributions. There's enough overinflation/fraud in papers that we dont need to be encouraging it by asking them to over-over inflate a possible reason for the work that is beyond the obvious ones that reviewers in the same field would appreciate.

All IMHO. There's no "right", just "preferred".