Mathematicians are bitterly divided over a controversial proof
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Part of the problem might be caused by the Government whose grant system just doesn't work for this scale of problems.
I agree. Reading carefuly a page of a normal paper and verifiying all the steps takes like 1 day. This is probably harder, so let's be optimistic and say 2 days. Do you want to pay the salary of a mathematician for 3 years? It's better to have 2 or 3 reading it and comparing notes. Can you pay all the team?
Another problem is "Publish or Perish". It's hard to justify to only read the proof and after 3 years only publish "Yep, it's correct." or worse "Nope, there is a unfixable wrong minus sign in page 417."
Assuming it's (almost) correct, what will happen is that small teams will read the begining, and make corrections and generalizations and publish them. Then the same team or another team will analyze the next chapter... So it will take longer, probably 10 or 20 years. Probably a lot of the notation will be simplified or become part of the hivemind standard. Perhaps someone may find some shorcuts.
This is what happened with the Last Fermat Theorem proof. Now there are short proof and some people (not me) understand the proof. I expect something similar.
Come on, Mochizuki's proof has to be an abyssmall of different mathematics ideas. Those 500 pages are effectively unseen, so just generalize any few lines and call it Mochizuki-Smith something by the name of a guy who used it first and by the name of a guy who explained it first.
The difference is that you think that nobody is reading them, and I think that there are a few research groups triying to read it. (No, I don't know any of them.)