ladder climbing in academia is not fun, but I feel like communicating (or marketing) science is a essential part of scientific process, as we are often the only person able to describe our work in great technical detail.

A famous professor once told me "we are all entertainers", which seems absurd from an outside prospective, but is a notion that I and many of my colleagues have now found peace with.

Scrambled and unreadable mathematics should seldom be valued in modern scientific community, IMO; not everyone is Ramanujan after all. Even among geniuses, from Poincaré to Hilbert to Godel to Grothendick and to Tao, most genius are able to communicate their research quite well, and thrive in academia.