I'm never quite convinced by this kind of mind-reading explanation.

I do find the quality of thinking almost always declines in proportion to the difficulty of the prose--even in Kant I tend to find his most difficult passages, once I've parsed through them, to be the least well-considered.

But what of the alternate hypothesis that Butler and others are honestly conveying their thoughts, using whatever jargon is appropriate for their subfield, and the real problem is that they cannot recognize their own bad arguments because both their thoughts and their prose are too opaque not just for the reader but for themselves.

For instance, how does one manipulate an idea like "the contingent possibility of structure inaugurates X"? Does one really have the same mental agility with such a concept as opposed to, say, "Thinking about how structure facilitates some outcomes over others lead us to start considering X"?

I suspect not.

Does the very long sentence full of jargon, which overwhelms most people's short-term memory capacity and therefore leaves a good deal of it unexamined, not also tax Butler's short-term memory capacity?

I suspect it does.

Therefore, I think the complex language is, a priori, equally likely not an intent to obscure bad arguments, but rather was what caused bad arguments.

So to buy that the intent was to obscure, I would want to see evidence that the author has not simply confused themselves, and is forthrightly sharing their confusion with us, in the manner in which they have experienced it themselves.