Can someone with more experience in scientific writing comment on

> It’s too circuitous and indirect for a scientific report

The preceding paragraph does not seem unreasonable to me--maybe a bit too glib, but nothing that couldn't be touched up.

in scientific writing, you need to take

100 articles at 6 pages each

and condense them to 1 article of 6 pages

And add how your method/insight moves the conversation forward, along with describing your method/insight.

The reason why scientific writing can be hard to read from the outside is the 100:1 compression. Decompression of that can require some knowledge of the field.

Also, some people are just bad at writing.

The goal of a paper is to write up the actual discovery, not to tell a story or explain irrelevant background. The steps he wrote there would confuse rather than elucidate the actual discovery.