alt Hacker NewsPapers are written to peers. It shouldn't be a "murder mystery" for them (that doesn't mean it shouldn't tell a story). You have to write to your audience. If a paper was written to a general audience, instead of peers, every paper would have to be a novel.
I'll admit that sometimes I'm frustrated with HN comments on arxiv articles. Despite being a nerdy forum most papers aren't written for this audience. Hell, I have a PhD and most papers aren't written for me. Nor should they. I'm perfectly okay if I don't understand a paper. Arguably the hardest thing about a PhD is learning to be comfortable with being dumb and willing to work on becoming less dumb (you're never not dumb, only less dumb)
That's true, but I think scientific writing often veers too hard towards impenetrability. At least in machine learning, many of the hallmark papers are remarkably clear and simple in a way that most papers I read day-to-day aren't. Even something as simple as the problem setting can be written insightfully in a strong piece of work.