cruel optimism

I definitely agree on these points. There are ways to make academic writing more explicable to readers, but I'm just not sure if it should be done through short summaries of articles. As you said, resources like intro to X guides, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or even wiki sometimes, do aid one in one's understanding of particular terms, and a similar format can certainly be adopted for an academic article, when one elaborates on, while engaging with what one is citing in the piece. Mari Ruti and Kathleen Stewart, as @ecogoth mentioned, do this quite well. (Though I personally take some issue with Ruti's critique of critique in Distillations. Again, it was due to a matter of specificity and overgeneralization: "Progressive critical theory," she writes, "defined here loosely as a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, poststructuralism, Marxism, cultural studies, and deconstructive feminist and queer theory — has been relentlessly dismissive of habits, particularly of habits of thought that organize social collectivities." I'm not sure if this statement itself is necessarily true, given that plenty of contemporary Marxist theorists today, amongst other critical theorists, now work with affect precisely as a means of "organiz[ing] social collectivities". But anyway, I digress.) 
My hesitance wrt to short summaries is that because they are so condensed, one might just extract the limited content in them and run with it, without being made to see the nuances of the ideas when they are explored in greater detail. I picked up on your mention of Butler because inasmuch as her writing may be dense, it situates her concept of "performativity" within a specific context, vis-à-vis discussions of sexuality, class, ethnicity, vis-à-vis gender and power relations, vis-à-vis feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory etc etc. This is important because it stipulates the scope in which the term is/should be used. I'm not saying that everyone ought to slog through gender trouble just to be able to cite Butler, but that summaries such as the one she offered in her email is, while short and concise, somewhat insufficient. (I have joked, though, that I'd spent so much time going through her books, only for her to spell it all out in one email. But of course, I was kidding.)
Perhaps, then, what we need is not summaries to preface articles, but only for academics to expound on their ideas more clearly, because:  
But of course, we can't all write like Mari Ruti or Sara Ahmed, and we'll all also have our own stylistic preferences. Say, certain theorists that my friends find unreadable, I rather enjoy, and vice versa (you'd probably never catch me reading analytic philosophy). It's partly about finding something that suits you, and using that as your way into a particular field, I think. 

It's not even 2020 yet, and we're already getting shellacked by NYU. 

This reminds me of http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm and all the controversy that followed.
My undergrad background is in mathematics. And trust me, Grothendieck's category-theoretic reframing of Galois theory cannot be explained in layman's terms no matter how much you try. It can be explained more or less elegantly in technical terms, in ways that require more or less technical knowledge (although the rigor always decreases the broader the audience). If you think literary studies is filled with jargon, take a look at a math paper and see how much you understand. And would you still insist that the use of jargon is problematic in this case? If not, can you articulate what causes the difference?
Of course there is such a thing as bad writing or intentional convoluted-ness for the sake of hiding the inadequacies of one's ideas, but to presuppose academic arguments, a priori, can be communicated in layman's terms is, to me, a fairly ungrounded and honestly implausible claim. If anything, "putting academic arguments in layman's terms" has given rise to enormous amount of misunderstandings of academic claims that have led to quite dangerous and problematic fallouts.
Gatekeeping is not the using technical and precise language; rather, gatekeeping is making that language inaccessible. The communal maintenance of intellectual rigor is what makes humanistic thought possible at all, and being inducted into its language is what education is for. When I'm confused by an article, I usually read more about it--the context of the article, the theoretical texts (which sometimes requires more secondary texts to elucidate), prior scholarship--after which the confusion often disappears. Again, this is not to deny that bad writing exists, but there's much more to the picture, I think.

I'd say one long, sustained piece of writing is preferable to two shorter ones (unless there's such a discrepancy in quality), since you're likely better able to demonstrate your research and reading skills in the former than the latter. Though of course, if you're working from your senior thesis, you'll likely have to extract and contextualize chapters/sections from it, and it sometimes isn't easy to make that call.
On my end, I've decided that creating a new WS from scratch, based on a tangential idea in my honours thesis (which I'd like to continue pursuing at grad school) was the best option for me, but each to their own, I guess. 

Hi all, chanced upon this list of funded MAs in English on twitter today, and thought I should share it here, just in case anyone needs the information, or has anything to add to the document. 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XZ7ejtJETaRH7ufh2O1S21HOeTTy9EYgi7Z5vUHCRLI/edit#gid=0

Hi all, chanced upon this list of funded MAs in English on twitter today, and thought I should share it here, just in case anyone needs the information, or has anything to add to the document. 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XZ7ejtJETaRH7ufh2O1S21HOeTTy9EYgi7Z5vUHCRLI/edit#gid=0

Hi all, chanced upon this list of funded MAs in English on twitter today, and thought I should share it here, just in case anyone needs the information, or has anything to add to the document. 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XZ7ejtJETaRH7ufh2O1S21HOeTTy9EYgi7Z5vUHCRLI/edit#gid=0

In off the waitlist at Loyola

I agree with you wholeheartedly but I would also give all my surplus organs to work with Berlant ??‍♀️

Just got a call from Dr. Sae Saue offering me admission to SMU

I finally had the call with UCSC and am so happy to say I've been accepted!! 
I should have known with the email saying they wanted to talk, but with how the season has gone I had so much doubt. I am ecstatic! 

Friends!!! I just had a paper on dynamics of embodied race in Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby" accepted for publication in an undergraduate research journal! I am OVER THE MOON! My first academic publication!