yes

No I think it does - almost like free-range foraging vs. being spoon-fed information (wild animal vs. domesticated) - in the former you learn how to quickly discriminate between good/useful food and bad and develop a kind of intuition for how to efficiently find the good stuff whereas in the latter you do not. 

then read it again but non-ironically 

ughh you are right, missed opportunity 

Fair enough, but as I said not all writing has to be aimed at maximum concision and clarity (and insisting that it should be is bad for our collective creativity). One may choose to write in a less direct manner in order to briefly present numerous tangentially related ideas (which readers may follow up on if they choose) or simply to provide a more varied and entertaining reading experience. Believe it or not, there are other goals that one can have in writing and reading besides maximally efficient communication/intake of information. 

So there is really no purpose to every read something non-fiction besides efficient intake of information? Is that what we really believe? 

I could not care less whether or not any reads this. 

Efficient communication/intake of information is not the only reason that people write or read...