@jeidsath
I wish our discussion had picked up the context-switching part of my post, rather than the calumny.
Yes it can be irksome (if I may use another fading word—we must keep these words alive!) when respondents only pick up on incidentals (or worse, as in a response to a post by daivid above, cut the quoted excerpt short in order to change its meaning altogether), but you did rather invite it. 
So, to oblige:
@mwh – Composition practice seems helpful for comprehension, despite being inauthentically checked by non-native speakers. In fact, it seems to be extremely helpful.
No argument there, in fact I’d say it’s helpful for building familiarity with how the language works. But I think it’s important that efforts at writing Greek should be gone over by people with better acquaintance with the language on hand to correct mistakes and offer suggestions for improvement, otherwise there’s a big risk of perpetuating faults and bad habits. Your admirable Sidgwick thread goes some way to dealing with this by offering Sidgwick’s own versions, but even that is not always enough.
Similarly, simplified Greek to avoid mental context-switching may have advantages at various times, especially when a learner is still trying to learn the bulk of the parts of the Greek language which no one disputes.
Perhaps. I like exercises that ring small changes in vocabulary or syntax, such as Markos has occasionally offered, and that is possible without translation. But “simplified Greek” can mean all sorts of things, and I see little value in dumbed-down paraphrases that show no respect for what the original actually says; nor in producing our own Greek scholia, at least not until Greek and scholiastic language is properly mastered (so I except chad), and probably not even then; and certainly not in discussing difficult Thucydidean passages in our own paltry Greek, a perfectly absurd suggestion. I’d rather read good Greek than write bad, and real Greek rather than fake. Most—not all—of the homemade Greek (as distinct from Eng.-Gk. Greek) I’ve seen on these boards is puerile and teems with elementary grammatical howlers (ὅταν ἔβρεξεν for instance, which turned up just today). No disgrace in that, unless accompanied by patronizing judgments and impudent advice on how best to attain fluency.
Here is a another piece of writing, explaining precisely the same thing as the first paragraph quoted: > http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/modal.htm
Easy, huh? Now which author is an important academic, and which author is an uncredited producer of website copy? The incomprehensibility of the first version is a feature, not a bug. It makes the unimportant sound important and justifies the author’s position to herself and to her readers. It communicates to those already in the know, and leaves everyone else in the dark. This is a sort of sclerosis of our academic system, as it has grown richer and more universal. There are vast incentives towards labyrinthine prose and few towards plain language.
Not having read more than the quoted extract I can’t be sure, but I supposed that by “modalizing particles” she meant particles such as γε, not what the website author calls “modal verbs” (by which is meant modalized verbs). What she says certainly seems applicable to the γε in our Sophocles passage. But anyway, your general complaint about academic writing is a common one which I think is to some extent justified (when I encounter “imbricated”—all too often—I stop reading), and I have to agree with your final sentence, but this particular excerpt doesn’t seem all that objectionable to me. We’ve been leading very closeted lives if we don’t all know what speech acts and illocutionary utterances are by now.
) there is a formal difference between ὅτε and ὅταν and I see no reason to conflate them. If fact, I went ahead and edited my post. (On top of anything, I got the accent wrong!) I just mention it to show how I sometimes write Greek, particularly when in a more experimental mode.