Julia, I agree with your take here, thank you for bringing this thought process into the mainstream. There are many other concepts this happens with and in other ways: people sing praises of the pedagogic excellence in Skiena’s & Sedgewick’s algorithm textbooks (and the awful EPI book by Aziz et al) but I hate reading them, they’re actually written horribly to explain things, IMO. I think this form of difficult writing on top of already difficult concepts is a weird type of gate keeping (perhaps sometimes unintentional?) and it should be tackled all over Computer Science by better writers who have an explanation style like yours.