To be fair, only a few of these sound like actual problems.
>The only person who would read a journal paper and say that the the author has good writing skills is another academic.
No one outside of the research community would look at a typical journal paper and claim that the writing skills demonstrated are "solid".
Scientific papers are written for people in the research community.
>3. Trying to explain how I arrived at an expression that took me weeks to derive was discounted and I was told to remove it by my advisor: As long as I wrote the starting point "any competent researcher should be able to derive it" (hint, probably half cannot).
This seems very context dependent.
>4. Writing any background so that someone who is not already an expert can understand was strictly forbidden - always guaranteed to get a complaint by some reviewer or another. If it appears in a textbook or in another paper, do not think about including it in your paper. As a result, the only people who can understand your paper fully are those who have happened to read the same textbooks and papers you have. A poor new graduate student may need to look through several papers and a book or two to get the background needed for one section of your paper, even though you could have explained it all in a page or two. But nope - they may have to go scan over a hundred pages of material to have an idea.
The poor new grad student should pour over multiple papers to get a solid foundation of the field. Most researchers do not want to read an epic tome to figure out how your research is novel.
I agree with your first two writing points though.
>The only person who would read a journal paper and say that the the author has good writing skills is another academic. No one outside of the research community would look at a typical journal paper and claim that the writing skills demonstrated are "solid".
Scientific papers are written for people in the research community.
>3. Trying to explain how I arrived at an expression that took me weeks to derive was discounted and I was told to remove it by my advisor: As long as I wrote the starting point "any competent researcher should be able to derive it" (hint, probably half cannot).
This seems very context dependent.
>4. Writing any background so that someone who is not already an expert can understand was strictly forbidden - always guaranteed to get a complaint by some reviewer or another. If it appears in a textbook or in another paper, do not think about including it in your paper. As a result, the only people who can understand your paper fully are those who have happened to read the same textbooks and papers you have. A poor new graduate student may need to look through several papers and a book or two to get the background needed for one section of your paper, even though you could have explained it all in a page or two. But nope - they may have to go scan over a hundred pages of material to have an idea.
The poor new grad student should pour over multiple papers to get a solid foundation of the field. Most researchers do not want to read an epic tome to figure out how your research is novel.
I agree with your first two writing points though.