Feel free to try to un-press your condescension button; it's not helping you present your case at all. You just come across as rude and hostile.
Let me try to restate a bit better. Feynmann wasn't the first, even in physics (Faraday may have been). But for Feynmann to do what he did in his lectures, he had to find a simpler way to present it - not because the words were hard, but because the mathematics was.
What I want from the humanities is a bit different. Not easier words, but fewer. There's an article about a fifth the length of this one waiting to be written. It would have the same content, too, and would be far more readable (and read!) by non-humanities types. I suspect that even many freshman humanities students would appreciate the difference. (If you're a humanities major, you don't lack for pages to read.)
Now, if you want to say that this wasn't written for the HN crowd, that's probably true. But it got posted here, and here we are.
I assert that there is a possible way of writing that 1) is acceptable within the humanities, 2) does not "dumb down" the content trying to be communicated, and 3) is much more accessible to the non-humanities reader. But I'm not a humanities person myself, so I could be dreaming. 1) might be fundamentally opposed to 3).