IMO it can be both "hard" and "really, really hard", depending on paper's difficulty. Some papers are much easier to read - e.g. those describing experimental results. Often, being the 0.01% who understand something is enough - it's one thing to read a paper, understand the basic reasoning and trust the conclusion / proposed method; it's another and more difficult thing to fully comprehend the paper and verify its correctness. Often you don't need that full comprehension to make progress and put the paper to good use.
> The problem here is that you need literally years of background studies to appreciate the insight. There likely is no quick and easy way around it, otherwise some of the extremely smart people involved would already have had figured it out -- assuming otherwise is hubris.
That's fair; something of a scientific version of efficient market hypothesis, I guess. If following the bleeding edge of a scientific domain didn't require years of background studies, it would be easy, so scientists would quickly zoom through it, until the going got difficult again.
> This doesn't mean that the system cannot be improved upon: there's tons of ways to make things simpler, clearer, more digestible. However, you'll still be left with hard problems of hard things being hard.
Yeah, I was just thinking about ways to tackle the things that can be made "simpler, cleaner, more digestible". I don't deny that there are fundamentally hard problems we have to face directly, but right now, those problems are wrapped in a lot of irrelevant cruft that makes them bigger than they really are.
> try reading an abstract and explaining it back to me
Challenge accepted, though I know the result kind of reinforces your point. But here's what I understood from that abstract:
> Using elliptically fibered Kummer surfaces of Picard rank 17, we construct an explicit model for a three-parameter bielliptic plane genus-three curve whose associated Prym variety is two-isogenous to the Jacobian variety of the general three-parameter hyperelliptic genus-two curve in Rosenhain normal form. Our model provides explicit expressions for all coefficients in terms of modular forms
We took a particular weird abstract shape with interesting properties, and used it to describe a particular different weird abstract shape, whose properties are important to us. Abstract shapes can be written down as maths, and depending on the way you write it, they can have properties exposed directly as "knobs" to tweak - e.g. "circle of radius r" has a radius exposed directly, whereas "circle that fits in that place" hasn't. In this paper, our description of the weird abstract shape has its important knobs exposed.