Probably my favourite Lamport story is that his original Paxos paper was written in such a basic style (literally, Byzantine generals) that readers failed to realise exactly how revolutionary the content was.
Byzantine generals were there in one of his earlier papers.
> At the PODC 2001 conference, I got tired of everyone saying how difficult it was to understand the Paxos algorithm, published in [122].
https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#paxos-simpl...
I didn't start working on distributed storage systems until 2007. Perhaps some people who read the paper in 1997 had a different impression.
Edit: maybe we have different takes on this story from that same url:
> My attempt at inserting some humor into the subject was a dismal failure. People who attended my lecture remembered Indiana Jones, but not the algorithm. People reading the paper apparently got so distracted by the Greek parable that they didn't understand the algorithm.
You're saying they didn't understand the importance; I took that to mean they didn't understand the details. ... and reading onward from the section I quoted, it sounds like your take was correct!
This comes from Lamport himself, after having colleagues read the paper he asked them if they new a such and such distributed consensus algorithm and they could not think of one.
I'd argue that the algorithm itself is simple, and that the difficult part is understanding why it works (i.e., why it satisfies the safety guarantees).
> It seems to be proof that trying to sound impressive is actually important.
I agree with this, and would add that making a paper sound impressive rarely conflicts with making it easy to understand. If anything, pointing out the contributions and applications of an approach help readers to understand that approach. At any rate, the same paper made easier to understand will generally be more likely to be accepted.