Interestingly, 500 years ago, math was to your taste. There were not much symbols in it, but lots and lots of English (or, more often, French, German, or Latin) sentences that took paragraphs upon paragraphs of text to describe what today a couple of equations do...
I find a good paragraph explaining what the equation means and implies is far more useful than the equation alone.
This is all the typical "what" vs "why". If you just want to describe the what then the formula alone might be enough (and just presuming everyone know what the variables mean), but if you actually want to convey a some meaning that formula needs to be explained.
You are arguing against a strawman. I have never seen any piece of mathematics that was just formulas. The heavy majority of any mathematical writing is plain text -- formulas and notation are only used when it would be much less practical to express something in text.
I appreciate your response it is well thought out and leaves me struggling hard to find a counter-example. I feel that I know that I have had to deal with this, but I cannot find examples.
Before your response I had several hours with just downvotes and did not know why. I wish people would comment with their downvotes.
