This feels like a better answer. I'm increasingly of the opinion that any piece taking on a rich, challenging topic needs to be a few thousand words at least.

This feels like a better answer. I'm increasingly of the opinion that any piece taking on a rich, challenging topic needs to be a few thousand words at least. Anything less means that important rebuttals go unaddressed and evidence gets cherry-picked. If you can fit your prescription for Syria into a 500 word column, you can't possibly have included enough information to lead your readers to an informed conclusion. At best you've offered an idea without claiming to prove it, at worst you've tossed off a handful of facts and pretended to rigor. If you want good small, frequent posts, you'd better keep your scope similarly small. Tell me about a campaign speech and its significance, but don't diagnose the entire election. Or pick a settled technical topic and just be didactic, but be prepared to research every sentence. It's fun to write bold, strident essays on a topic, but it doesn't do very much. The value-added part is the fact-finding and fact-checking slog, and I think a lot of people (myself included) underestimate just how much more time goes into researching a good essay than actually writing it. Just as you said, a good work on a big topic takes tens of hours, even to address one aspect. For me, this means that I abandon a lot of work - I care enough to write about it (fun), but not enough to firmly ground that writing (exhausting). So I try to either escape the problem with speculative writing, or judge my interest early on and decide whether to follow through before wasting time. So when I hear someone say that the analysis in their writing is weak, and their research is shallow, I'm hopeful! It means that they're writing with enough self-awareness to actually seek the truth.