You are correct. I did this intentionally for answers I felt were unfriendly as a fill. Since the puzzle avoids filler, there are fewer crossings available to help infer answers. I made a few clues more direct to keep them from becoming opaque. Any thoughts on this format?

Just an idea, but you could simply remove the names from the clues, and if you feel it's not a fair puzzle at the end, add slightly more guidance where needed (e.g., for the Lempel-Ziv one, say that the answer is two names), but honestly I don't think you would need to add that. The best crosswords IMO are pretty vague, and you can't usually just answer clues one by one to fill them in. Yours is of course a little different because not every letter belongs to two clues, but I still think there would be enough context left at the end.