I disagree, once you are in the field, you look at abstract->figures->conclusions.

Introductions are useful if you are reading a paper outside your field or if you are hunting for citations to write your own paper related to the topic.

So as far as getting citations is concerned, introductions are pretty low priority

Then you have to make peace with not understanding all the phrases but only the gist of the problem the paper is tackling.

If you are interested enough in a question to ask on a forum, it might be a better idea to go through the paper in the second pass first.

Reading papers, at least initially is slow and hard, but you will pick up pace and learn to navigate it with enough effort.

yep

oh yeah, same. This should have been caught.

This is true, but also we can't expect papers to adapt to us, we have to adapt to them and build practices that will help parse them quickly.

This is definitely an error but blaming the author doesn't get you anywhere so might as well learn how to mitigate the issues.

The mutiple pass approach is good, but it would help to dynamically switch between passes when you get stuck somewhere or just mark where you are stuck till the next pass.

The first pass will leave you with more questions than answers, your job is to judge whether the questions are interesting enough for the next pass.

I think you are not reading academic papers correctly. It's not useful to get obsessed with every turn of phrase.

In this particular instance, they most likely wanted to say "scheduling units to be consistent with the layer-wise computations enforced in ..." .You can easily realize this by checking section 3.1 of the paper.

The introduction of any paper is generally the least useful and most vague component, it is useful for context and when you are writing a paper but not for understanding the contents of the paper itself.