I think a lot of it comes from following advice similar to "Write a Catchy First Paragraph" and it goes too far. You end up starting out with bizarre barely-seq

I think a lot of it comes from following advice similar to "Write a Catchy First Paragraph" and it goes too far. You end up starting out with bizarre barely-sequiturs like "Fiona was a graduate student in lower New York in a family cafe run by a man named João sipping her usual order of single-origin cappuccino on a rainy Wednesday" before we even find out what the article is about, let alone what the actual insight is. Furthermore, a lot of popular science ends up using the people involved as the lens through which the ideas are eventually viewed. Which makes a lot of sense for professional writers who are probably more attuned to the human interest than technical people. For an example, the first thing I did with a Lego vehicle model kit was to throw the little figurine into the "junk bits box" and proceed with a now-robotic model. Many things are more like Oppenheimer than Trinity Device Annotated Systems Manual. Which doesn't mean they're wrong, per se: the audience for it is probably bigger and the overall "utility" of the work is higher. And even a grump like me knows you shouldn't completely ignore human factors. On top of that, people who can write the complex technical stuff often don't want to mess about in the middle ground. But the bimodality is still annoying to me: people-centric "Stories" or deeply-involved dessicated technical material that I don't easily understand if it's not my field and not so much in-between.