For the casual reader, the "bad writing" aspect of the difficulty is severely outweighed by the "lack of domain knowledge" aspect, by several orders of magnitud

For the casual reader, the "bad writing" aspect of the difficulty is severely outweighed by the "lack of domain knowledge" aspect, by several orders of magnitude. If you take a random modern research paper, and put it through a handful of editors to make it superbly written in a clear, convincing language that gets its points across very easily, the casual reader uneducated in the background knowledge will barely be able to tell the difference.