I like the answers in the last part. I literally had an interview today where I quoted a professor of mine from about a decade ago. He was very upset with me about some incorrect types in my javadoc comments and told me "The only thing worse than no documentation is wrong documentation!" :)
For your answer on good documentation, that's a good general answer. As you say there are lots of layers to it. Some ideas just from my current viewpoint:
- From my forays into foreign language learning I picked up the linguist's Stephen Krashen's research after learning about it from my language exchange partner. One of the main themes of his research is the idea of "Comprehensible Input"(CI). CI is the idea that you acquire knowledge via exposure to new language that is at a difficulty level where you understand most of what's being said. Then you acquire these new smaller pieces of knowledge via context. I would say this is most closely related to what you mean by structure of the documentation. Obviously with some overlap with the content itself.
- There's also a stronger version of CI that adds an additional piece to this, the content must be of interest to the acquirer/learner. This property is I think the closest to what I think you mean in regards to content of documentation.
In my opinion reaching the first goal, Comprehensible Input, where knowledge is able to be acquired efficiently is step 1. Resources of this type can be created much more easily as there is less subjectivity about the content's style itself rather than simply the pacing of the concepts introduced. The second part is obviously the hard part :) Maybe style text style transfer will start to get really good without the possibility of it influencing the former?
[X] - Old video of Krashen explaining his central ideas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUc_W3xE1w
P.S. I specifically mentioned text style transfer because I noticed your team had an offer of bringing in trusted technical writers. What would be a very good deal for both you, doc writers(at the client side), doc consumers, and 3rd party writers is the ability for their style to be automatically transferred into anyone's technical writing. 3rd party writers can license their fingerprinted style, Client side writers get a neat assist on quickly changing their writing style, and readers get a choice of voice they identify with.