As a former academian, I mostly disagree. In my experience, papers are difficult to read because they are as concise as possible, striving to refer to previous work for anything that's not original, and only elaborating on original things. This is done to make them as quick as possible to read by experts, which is pretty important given the immense volume of papers that appear in many fields.
I do think papers nowadays need to include a link to a zip file (or whatever other format - but it should be a boring old format unlikely to change or be abandoned, and not proprietary either) including all data, code, and so on. This data is necessary to verify the paper's results, but it is not the results themselves.
> I mostly disagree. In my experience, papers are difficult to read because they are as concise as possible, striving to refer to previous work for anything that's not original, and only elaborating on original things. This is done to make them as quick as possible to read by experts, which is pretty important given the immense volume of papers that appear in many fields.
This is consistent with what I said: Papers are difficult to read by choice. Yes, they strive to make it as concise as possible, which translates to making them harder to read.
Where I would disagree is the claim that it is done to make it as quick as possible to read by experts. In my field, the experts would skim papers quickly to get an idea, but if they then honed in on a paper to actually extract the meat of it so they can use it in their own work, it would take a lot of time, and was a pain.
I've heard from math professors that it takes about a day to read and digest one page of a journal article in their field.
Also disagree on it merely being a matter of consulting references. My work was theoretical/computational. It was common to see the final equations without any derivation, and many experts would not be able to reproduce it. There are lots of tricks that go into the derivation, but they are not provided under the pretext that any expert should be able to solve the equations and derive them.
And in the day of digital media, it's quite trivial to write a paper the way you suggest, and then put all the extra details in appendices. I guarantee that they will be read by most people who want to read the paper in detail, as opposed to merely skimming it.
I do think papers nowadays need to include a link to a zip file (or whatever other format - but it should be a boring old format unlikely to change or be abandoned, and not proprietary either) including all data, code, and so on. This data is necessary to verify the paper's results, but it is not the results themselves.