The problem isn't the jargon itself, it's the fact that most labs have built up decades of institutional knowledge that they hoard for fear of their research being "scooped." I'm just thankful I don't work in downstream medical research anymore, where the number of replicable papers goes from one in two to one in ten, at best.

Your comment about reagents from one manufacturer failing while another succeeded brings back fond memories of trying to make our own botulinum neurotoxin to study neurons- and the rest about hoarding institutional knowledge reminds me why I tried to get out of that. I was one of those ambitious undergrads, but I permitted myself to wilt under the insanity of a system in which I KNEW that a partnered laboratory knew exactly what to do, but they were forbidden to share the knowledge because of politics. By the time I had cut through the wasteful uselessness, I discovered that the only sane person there, one who had been willing to share knowledge, she had actually DIED.

And so I merrily skipped over to the bioinformatics department, which has issues as well but in which I was able to manage them fairly effectively. :D

Unfortunately it's the same for software and algorithms (at least in bioinformatics, which is my field). Everything is treated like closely guarded secrets, at least in the smaller environments.

Thankfully the tendency is slowly being reversed and there are even things developed out in the open: the "problem" with those is that being in the open, it's harder to get publications out.