However in my experience if I trim down the sentence to summary-level passages they will lose a lot of meaning (whether intrisic or not) which I'm trying to convey. Nevertheless I'll take up your suggestion of introducing more subheadings so that the long piece will at least be readable to people skimming the article.
Thanks!
To preserve meaning, have you considered using more repetition? In a situation where jumping straight to the most-precise way to explain a point loses a lot of readers, it can be helpful to restate the same point a several times: Start with the most approachable but least accurate framing, then perhaps critique its inaccuracies as a transition to a less approachable but more accurate framing, and repeat till you've built a series of stepping stones from where your reader starts to where you want them to end up.
However in my experience if I trim down the sentence to summary-level passages they will lose a lot of meaning (whether intrisic or not) which I'm trying to convey. Nevertheless I'll take up your suggestion of introducing more subheadings so that the long piece will at least be readable to people skimming the article.