I agree, Plutarch, with practically everything you said except I might point out that a nuance, by it's nature, is speaker/listener specific. As a self-anointed lay person I interpret the "gist" of something as the "essence" of something. As well, it has been my observation that many writers of technical papers write to obfuscate by contrived jargon rather than elucidating their lack of something worthwhile to say.
And while we are on the subject; The planet Venus also has an axial retrograde rotation, and strangely, its orbit is nearly circular which leads me and the late Velikovsky (yes that late Velikovsky) to think that the planet is a newcomer to this part of the solar system. But I say, as the late President Nixon once said- No, I am not a kook.