However, the writing often dwells at length on trivialities, while passing very briefly through (or even obscuring) the most interesting and novel portions of the argument.

This is consistently my experience chatting with LLMs. It's an very interesting anti-feature, what does it mean about them fundamentally, could more sophisticated machines one day surpass this, etc.

Chomsky for example took the position that LLMs will never be able to explain things and he thought this anti-property was fundamental to their model of computation. But that was years ago.