> This was a tradeoff to appeal to people whose vocabulary is narrow, not improve comprehension.
”Comprehension” is not some audience-independent property of a text. Comprehension is what happens when a text is well-calibrated for an audience. If your audience is unlikely to know the word ”obviate” (which seems true of many engineering settings, where the audience is international), you absolutely improve comprehension by replacing it with words the audience is more likely to know.
I agree with you that ”obviate” sounds better, and in a setting like a blog post, monograph, or even an hn comment, that’s probably what I’d use. But in e.g. a work email for colleagues in another country, you reduce the risk of miscommunication by following OP’s suggestion.
”Comprehension” is not some audience-independent property of a text. Comprehension is what happens when a text is well-calibrated for an audience. If your audience is unlikely to know the word ”obviate” (which seems true of many engineering settings, where the audience is international), you absolutely improve comprehension by replacing it with words the audience is more likely to know.
I agree with you that ”obviate” sounds better, and in a setting like a blog post, monograph, or even an hn comment, that’s probably what I’d use. But in e.g. a work email for colleagues in another country, you reduce the risk of miscommunication by following OP’s suggestion.