[breuderink]

> They only have enough room to tersely describe directly relevant background material and will assume you are knowledgable in the domain.

I feel like it just is the dominant style; it doesn't have to be that way. Sometimes there are these gems, that are extraordinarily well written and bring new ideas in a gentle way. Some examples:

- Zhang, Cha, John C. Platt, and Paul A. Viola. "Multiple instance boosting for object detection." Advances in neural information processing systems. 2005.

- Gelman, Andrew, et al. Bayesian data analysis. Vol. 2. Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2014.

So, IMHO it can be done, but it is a talent.