Apologies, I did not mean to imply that "simpler papers" would be easier. Indeed, I suspect that depending on where you are wanting your paper submitted, it will not be possible. :(
My main thought is that as you bring in more and more libraries to accomplish things, you start bringing in more and more sets of assumptions about the underlying abstraction and these don't always hold. Somewhat ironically, I think of paper layout now as an optimization problem, akin to how TeX thinks of paragraph layout. That is, it will be somewhat iterative. No getting around that.
So, I sadly don't have any prescriptive advice. Just the observation that the simpler papers out there of Knuth's are quite a bit easier to read in source than many of the ones I have ever authored.
My main thought is that as you bring in more and more libraries to accomplish things, you start bringing in more and more sets of assumptions about the underlying abstraction and these don't always hold. Somewhat ironically, I think of paper layout now as an optimization problem, akin to how TeX thinks of paragraph layout. That is, it will be somewhat iterative. No getting around that.
So, I sadly don't have any prescriptive advice. Just the observation that the simpler papers out there of Knuth's are quite a bit easier to read in source than many of the ones I have ever authored.