In fact the analogy to music notation is I think a fairly strong one. People's complaints always sound to me like asking why we don't write "C3 sixteenth note" for music instead of using dots and lines. After all, how are we meant to know what the dots mean and remember the difference between an eighth and sixteenth, or what flats/sharps do? And then the key signature can modify all of it!
The notation just isn't a barrier. Once you learn to read it, it's there because it's a clearer way to write the ideas. The hard part for people is they don't understand the ideas, and don't have the frameworks like key signatures, chord progressions, and meter to place them within. Longer words for variables won't help people understand e.g. inner and outer regular measures, or the open cover definition of compactness. That comes from a lot of work to understand what you're trying to say, the pitfalls of saying it wrong, and precisely how your slightly different way of saying it avoids those pitfalls (or selects the best set of pitfalls if you must pick some kind of degenerate behavior).