Achieving a research-level understanding of a topic is quite different than working in the trenches on new research. I figured the goal of distill.pub was the f

Achieving a research-level understanding of a topic is quite different than working in the trenches on new research. I figured the goal of distill.pub was the former. I think you're partially describing a search problem. Google fails to return relevant passages from full-text papers/books for whatever copyright reasons (ignoring the notational buy-in). The remaining issue is that reviews/surveys/textbooks do not provide the complete picture necessary to perform successful research. I'm sure they fall short on specific things that are scattered around the web; practicalities, implementation details, quick definitions, etc. But are you suggesting that distilled publications should include all this information in one place?