Snobs in general tend to look down on people who don’t place value on pomposity for its own sake.
"Spoken writing" can be just as artificial and pretentious -- e.g. upper class writers writing as if they grew up in da hood. Or people dumbing down their language to sell more.
How we speak with a friend, and how we write, doesn't have to share the same language or tone or expressions or vocabulary even. Spoken is a stream of consciousness that we express in real time. Written is forever, so we have time to refine what we write, go deeper, be more artistic, add flourishes, and so on. This is not the same as "being obscure for being obscure's sake".
To make an analogy, what you ask for, in photography terms would be "all photography should be real life documentary-style scenes".
In fact, even "spoken" changes form all the time: you don't talk to your bong buddy the same as you talk to your parents, or spouse, or the same way you give a lecture as when you casual chat over coffee, or when you teach students. Tone changes, expression changes, vocabulary changes, level of difficulty changes, etc.
That in itself is snobbery. It's just fashion bouncing back and forth between hating on the poor and hating on the rich. One is fashionable until everyone does it then the opposite is in vogue.
Are the cool kids today wearing factory-ripped jeans these days or are they hating on people who do?
It is just stupid to say "this style is the only acceptable style and anyone doing anything different is an asshole". Surface quality is boring, substance is important.
It isn't stupid. It's snobbery. If you denigrate straightforward writing as "barbaric", you're a snob, plain and simple.
> Surface quality is boring, substance is important.
My problem with overly-flowery writing is specifically that it's about style and not substance. If your goal is to educate or to entertain, put that first. If your goal is to impress the reader with your loquacious conveyance of verbiage, fine, but you're sacrificing substance for style. And I personally think this sort of writing shows a disrespect toward the reader, because it's literally about the author showing off and trying to impress the reader.
You know how sometimes you'll go to a website and it hijacks your scrollbar to show some unnecessary visualization or a gratuitous rotating 3D view of a product? And you look at it and you can appreciate the artistry that went into creating the visualization, the skill that went into rendering everything perfectly and syncing it with the scrollbar. But mostly it's fucking obnoxious because you just want to scroll down to read the article or click the "buy" link and instead you're wasting your time fighting with the site that broke your scrollbar because some product manager was sure you'd be impressed. This is the website version of dense, flowery, self-important prose.
It's "straightforward" for you and your era and culture. For others it's merely a plain and crude version of what could be better writing.
There is the snobbery. Bad writing is everywhere. Some people have large vocabularies and use them well, some people don't. Becoming a good writer also requires a lot of bad writing. Complex writing more so. If you say everything complex is just about style and showing off, it reflects poorly on your ability to determine quality of complex, or any writing.
There is nothing wrong with not understanding something or having no interest in something, but doing this virtue signaling to put yourself above anything you don't understand is anti-intellectual bullshit and you might as well be protesting against vaccines. It's the same as black kids shaming each other for "talking white" or people yelling about how "we speak English in this country".
Besides, for many people there's nothing wrong with what some call "snobbery" but they call elitism or quality or high brow, etc.
They're not "snobs" caring who has this or that ancestry, who has expensive clothes, etc., but particular about language, expression, etc. Which is par for the course of being a writer, artist, or intellectual in general.
