I have to say that I completely disagree with you on this, but I also understand that I am a lot more comfortable writing prose than the average programmer. A

I have to say that I completely disagree with you on this, but I also understand that I am a lot more comfortable writing prose than the average programmer. A draft PR with rich documentation doesn't often communicate the "whys" and the "why nots" nearly as well as a well-written design document, or the high-level goals of a piece of code. It also is much harder to share with the product and business sides of a company which may be less comfortable with the idea of reading code. A great design doc can reduce non-obvious problems to trivial and is usually written alongside a prototype (if the thing is simple enough). I will give you that if you are instead competing with a poorly-written design document, a very well-documented PR may be a good alternative.