You think writing well about a hard idea means dumbing it down.
But the best science writers — Mukherjee on epigenetics in The New Yorker — never simplify the idea; they change how it's delivered.
They drive the piece with a question, foreground what they saw over their research, set up images that pay off in time, and import stakes through one loaded word instead of arguing.
So is it simpler ideas, or better storytelling?
Storytelling — the ideas stay hard.
Drive the piece with a question that licenses every digression, foreground the scene you witnessed and let it teach instead of defining, plant images early and pay them off at the end, and make the reader care by importing stakes through the narrative rather than arguing for them.
None of it simplifies the science; it just delivers it the way a story does, which is the only way a reader will keep it.