Totally. Sometimes, if one is really interested in the material and has time, it can be enjoyable to plough through the human interest fluff to get to the meat,

Totally. Sometimes, if one is really interested in the material and has time, it can be enjoyable to plough through the human interest fluff to get to the meat, but the majority of the time it just seems like a pretentious annoyance. Same deal with most popular science on TV - who has the time or energy to sit through an hour of tortuously drawn-out explanations interspersed with tangentially relevant video sequences, just to harvest the at most 5 mins of actually interesting fact?