that means using the vernacular of the field — Carbon

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Haha, that's pretty funny. But in all seriousness paper writing is still extraordinary difficult and submitting to high impact journals is kind of a make-or-break aspect of one's academic career. I'm not disparaging the practice, I'm saying that whole "sound smart" argument is less for show and more because that's what the field necessitates and you want to have a job after you spent all your time in grad school.

Think of it this way: odds are that after you finish your PhD, you're either doing postdoc research or teaching and you'll be spending roughly 6-10 hours a day reading and writing. It's not slack off reading and writing mind you; you're pouring over articles sometimes at the behest of others and sometimes for you own work. If you're pretty well versed in your selected field of writing you're crafting a paper over the course of month (roughly 10-20k words typically with an average of 30-60 references). This paper is going to be read by another professor or colleague who is going to butcher it and hand it back to you telling you that everything you that 75% of it is wrong. From there you're doing more edits, sorting out your own prose (which have be academic lest you are immediately rejected for organizational issues) and sending it out for publication.

Now if your paper was poorly written, uses the wrong vernacular for the field, or is out of context for the journal - that paper is desk rejected... This is the death of probably 70% of papers. The third that make it end up in the hands of two or three reviewers (who probably know you because the field is so small that you're publishing in), and they're going to decide whether what you're doing is relevant to the field or not.

At this point it's probably pretty clear why the "sounding smart" aspect of paper is there. First off, you're not writing to average people - you're writing a paper for specialists. Second, your paper needs to "fit" - it has to meet previously set standards of the journal and the field. If it doesn't, you're toast. The final aspect that I mentioned above is you're not writing accessible stuff because you want to say as much as you can in those 10k-20k words. These are expert reviewers reading your work, so no need to spend a whole paper defining a bunch of terms - you just have to make sure they're used correctly.

Now from there your paper is either going to get R&R-ed, rejected, or scored well and sent to the editor (who will then reject it, or accept it). If it is sent back to your for edits you're working on the damn thing for another month and sending it back. Now mind you - this process can take anywhere from 3 months to two years. So you are, in effect, forced to come back to this paper a lot if this is the life of it.

But you jump through those hoops and write that way because you want a job. They've shut down whole philosophy departments in the UK for not publishing in good enough journals. And then what? Then you're out on your ass with a few lousy publications, a bunch of unemployed co-workers, and highly competitive field. So would I rather write like I am now, forum-style? Absolutely! Do I want a steady job and be able to pay for food - yeah. Hence I'll write the damn paper using fancy words.

Of course, survival in academia is difficult; very competitive. The material on which docs and post-docs are expected to be expert is narrow, technical, and deep. I get it. Haven't done it, but I've seen others doing it. Don't envy them.

It really doesn't matter what academic field one is in, whether it's supply chain management, medieval French poetry, molecular biology, or philosophy. It's tough at the top. Deepest sympathies.

Yes, people here tend to use big words when short ones will do. Some of that is unavoidable, since the history of philosophy is littered with arcane words, and philosophy itself is, in my opinion, the search for the correct definitions to words. I often write a wall of text trying to explain a concept, and realizing that I went off on a tangent halfway through and didn't actually explain the thing.

If everyone could simply agree on the definitions beforehand, everything would be much easier. But that's the point, isn't it? Philosophy IS a semantic dispute. If you do it right, you realize that seemingly simple words gain subtle yet powerful meanings. You become changed in a way that is hard to communicate to others, since you now speak in a new language, even if you use the same words as everyone else. There is a powerful desire to make new words to fit these new meanings, but I think this is a mistake. The goal of philosophy should be to explain the deeper meanings of words, not confuse people with new ones.