Papers are not just blocks of equations. There is english giving context. There is also the issue of length limits for a paper. It's assumed that the reader has a background in the area and so the authors can be a bit more concise.

> structure

Most papers in math follow a common structure of definition-theorem-proof. You can think of lemmas as subroutines that are 'called' in a proof.

>not-greek-characters (but they make me look smart!)

Unless you're advocating spelling out things (i.e. calling something "decay constant" instead of using an alpha), I don't think there is a fundamental difference between using a Greek or English alphabet. Greek is nice because it gives you more characters to use beyond the English alphabet (which is already used extensively in math). If you _are_ advocating replacing single symbols with words, I think that would be pretty hard to parse, and rather cumbersome in longer formulas.

>abstractions

Math is _all about_ abstraction. I don't know what you mean by this.