I don't think we should shoot the messenger. There are too many academics with huge egos. Too many papers obfuscate simple results behind unnecessarily complex

I don't think we should shoot the messenger. There are too many academics with huge egos. Too many papers obfuscate simple results behind unnecessarily complex and brittle mathematical models, because huge formulas and proofs make the authors look smart, and impressing the reviewers is a requirement for publication. Everyone who has a PhD in engineering knows professors who make careers out of solving made up problems with tenuous connection with the real world, and thus highly questionable utility. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think engineering is about solving practical problems and building shit. And then in physics, it's apparently now mainstream to produce theories that aren't testable. Of course, the math has to be very sophisticated and specialized -- dead-end work with simple math wouldn't get funded, much less become an entire field of study. Which is to say: explaining reality is hard, and all the linear problems have solutions. Today, some find it more convenient to invent another universe that still has open problems, and solve those. To obfuscate, in comes a ton of math with weird notation invented with colleagues who also play this game. It would be awesome if 3 generations of researchers got scooped by an applied physicist from a different field because nobody bothered to model galaxy rotation curves with general relativity. GR would be too boring, entirely lacking in crazy math.