As an academic I know that at a stage when you're thrashing ideas around exploratorily it would be exhausting and unreasonable to expect interlocutors to make that discussion intelligible to those who aren't already able to understand it. Once you get to the publication stage, you set yourselves much higher standards of perspicuity, but you're still entitled to assume a certain level of prior knowledge from your readers. Not every academic publication is a beginners' textbook.