I never said, nor meant, that "papers should be boring", or even that technical writing should be boring. What I said, exactly, was:
"Boring" is not a flaw, in technical writing.
I think it's interesting how not only your comment, but those of others, misread that part of my comment and made a jump from "boring is not a flaw" to "papers should be boring".
The reason I think it is interesting is because it reveals the amount of work that must go into a technical text to avoid such misunderstandings. For every single statement that matters, for every single point that is made, in a paper, there is a number of ways to misunderstand it, of varying degrees of obvious-ness. As a paper author, you have to try to think of each and every one of them, try to predict how likely it is that different kinds of readers will commit those kinds of misundestanding, and then try to defend your text against the most likely ones, at the very least. Since some of your readers are going to be reviewers, doing this well is the difference between getting your paper published, getting it rejected, or having it accepted with "minor" revisions (which are only so "minor" as the possibility for misunderstandings, so usually, not that much). So this anticipation of potential misunderstandings is a vital, essential skill that you develop as a paper writer.
Er. I mean "scientist", of course.
For this (oops) reason, I disagree with the use of pronouns etc. I actively try to avoid sentences like "This suggests" or "That means" or "It is an efficient way to" etc. just because I'm sure that "this", "that", "it", and their friends, will only serve to misdirect the reader's attention. Because when you write "it", you're thinking of X, but when the reader reads "it", they are actually thinking of Y, just because they're more interested in Y, so "it" is just a point of confusion. And that (oops) will _always_ happen because the author of a paper and the paper's readers will have different interests and tend to focus on different parts of a paper.
The way I think about the use of pronouns is a little bit like loops in assembly: you want to "unroll" them to improve efficiency. Similarly, I always "dereference" pointer-words like pronouns etc, to remove ambiguity.