What I was wondering - and still am - shouldn't it be possible to get to a "Pleasant" justified layout on the web in general?
The jagged left-aligned paragraphs are some of the first bits people point to when invoking "my PDF looks better". I definitely am not saying I did it perfectly, but shouldn't it be possible to get a good justified scientific article on the web? Why not?
“Looks better” only works in regard to justification when one is admiring a page overall. However, that's not how people actually read text. They look at words in lines, and at that time uneven spacing keeps tripping the eye up. I know this argument, but there's no way around this discussion, and that's all there is to say about it (so far). Nicely looking bricks of paragraphs won't make the eye glide smoothly over the holes.
Page layout programs spend some CPU time on fiddling the hyphenation until the spacing is even. Browsers can't afford to do that, afaik (not sure about currently, but that was the situation a while back). Moreover, from what I vaguely heard, the HTML specification defines paragraphs in such a way that browsers don't even have the freedom to fiddle the paragraph height—something about the height being the minimum for the text on hand, or something like that.
Even if you insist to keep justification on desktop (though I personally can see the holes clearly)—for the love of good, please disable it on phones. It's just a mess there.
I think I can see that, but it's almost there, which is why it feels like there has to be something I'm missing for it to justify "just right".
But yes, at the least you've convinced me we should have a separate theme that goes left-aligned, and possibly makes a number of other choices that maximize readability.
Since I'd still want the folks that want "as good as PDF", to feel justified for sticking around.