[Ursa major]

In a way, this argument is related to another thread where the issue of the spelling out of dialect is being discussed. (From what I can see, a certain amount is considered fine, to give the flavour of the language, but its use should be tempered by kindness to the reader.)

Reading a book should not be made into a Herculean effort; neither should it be only a few steps beyond seeing how Janet and John play with Spot.

Coming from a background where whole sentences could be (and are) made up of acronyms and specific, technical words, I can see the need for them; when one is defining a specification, accuracy - at the expense of skimable text - is paramount. (Such texts tend to have glossaries and lists of abbreviations to help those not yet up to speed.)

In works aimed at a wider audience, the desire to be ever more precise can be counterproductive, if taken too far. But as luck would have it, we can have a happy medium, where the more obscure, but precise, words can be lightly sprinkled into the text, as long as the casual reader can get the gist of the whole; in the meantime, we dictionary hounds can both build our vocabularies and get a clearer picture of what is in the author's mind.