Yeah :/. I was sent the Vitalik article by someone, and (despite other people liking it) found it somewhat poorly written (as did another friend of mine in the same group chat, who was left with similar questions) and then searched around trying to find more information and came across the original paper--the abstract for which was way way better than Vitalik's article :D--that hadn't been linked anywhere in the various internal cluster of references and documentation by any of the Ethereum people, near far as I could tell :(.