That doesn't express the same thoughts at all though.

I guess what it comes down to is that some people perhaps see it as pompous to place the precise expression of one's thoughts above the simple and efficient conveyance of information.

To these people, I say: read more poetry.

To find true opacity-for-its-own-sake one must look to the french postmodern "philosophers" of the 1960s:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

Utterly unforgivable.

I don't understand. This kind of sentences is routine in New York Times. If anything, I find the conversational tone inappropriate for such a weighty subject. I do agree that the author tried too hard to write to a broader audience on a complicated subject. The result is too much ink for too little info.