I've come across this recently, in widely differing contexts: a very well-constructed theoretical argument, academically impeccable by current standards, but then the poetry it is supposedly illustrating is aesthetically trivial. Then, looking back at the argument, it looks pretentious in proportion to what it is going to explain.
Dressing up a simple fact in theoretical pretention: that is not the purpose of theory. The purpose would be to explain something that otherwise wouldn't make sense.
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