You're absolutely right that this is a lot of work, and not many ML researchers have all the skills needed for it.

In the short term, Distill's editorial assistance will help authors produce outstanding papers, although they need to be willing to work as well.

In the longer-term, I'd like to explore match making between data visualization people who would like to get into machine learning and machine learning researchers publishing papers.

And in the very long term, I think the right solution is to add a new component to the research ecosystem. Just like we we have people who specialize as research engineers, theoreticians, and experimentalists, I'd like to have a respected "research distiller" specialization. Eventually, I'd like to try and start special grants for research groups to have someone focused on this.