I agree with you last point, and I really, really want to with the first.

Sometimes science feels more like an art, for chemistry at least. I suppose the counter-point to this is: if you provide sufficient detail to reproduce but your results are still difficult to reproduce reliably by others, then your process wasn’t very robust and should have undergone more development before publishing. Those details may be so minor that you don’t even realize that you overlooked something.

Counterpoint: the scientific method is much simpler than you described.

1. Fuck around
2. Find out
3. Write it down

The rest are details of the above or elitism.

Alternate PhD

Spoken like a round leaf.

Fucking GOOD! Holy hell, still a terrible story to imagine.

And the jolly rancher.

That’s assuming they are competent enough to even use a PDF.

Read the manual and if something’s broken, give fixing it a shot even if you end up breaking it more.

When you read the manual, you learn things (often including how to fix them without breaking them more). The more things you know how to fix, the more everything starts to look familiar. This is how those people who seem to be ridiculously good at fixing everything learned to be good.