It always takes longer to write short emails, which is why so few people do it.

Practice makes perfect. Writing short, concise pieces of text that express your thoughts in an easily digestable is really hard, a challenge of its own (despite what you want to say) - it's like a form of "professional" art, that few master.

Also, on reviewing the email, there was some formatting which may have helped the readability and draw attention to the central question. There was a fair amount of whitespace between the paragraphs and the main question was center-aligned and in bold.

This seems weird when someone else says it...but I relate!

To a job well done!