Why is it that pretty much everything Knuth writes is wildly detailed but yet, somehow, deeply engaging? Maybe I'm such a fan because of many great experiences

Why is it that pretty much everything Knuth writes is wildly detailed but yet, somehow, deeply engaging? Maybe I'm such a fan because of many great experiences with tex (and latex). The output is just so beautiful. And the notation (once you get used to the backslashes etc) is so clean. But, heck, I got hooked when I studied Figure 12 of [1], as an undergraduate leafing through a math journal. At first, I thought "what's wrong with this nutcase, those "s" letters all look fine to me". Then I started to see differences. And then some looked ugly. That one in the middle, though, looked better and better, the more I studied the figure. Pretty soon, I was hooked. 1. Knuth, Donald E. “Mathematical Typography.” Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 1, no. 2 (March 1979): 337–72.