Like a medical school that ends with a pie eating contest to determine who gets to become a doctor.

This is a disturbingly apt comparison.

Hell, now I feel like I should rewrite most of the complex numbers primer that I made since I have assumed that the reader is prepared to do some heavy lifting instead of (at least that's how it seemed to me) being 'spoon-fed'.

I say leave it as-is. At least part of the problem I see is that bad math education tends to hand people properties that seem to have appeared from thin air. On the other hand, if you say, "why is X true?", then that gives an explicit clue to people that they should (if interested) sit down and try to work that out.

Proofs are tricky things to write, but I do prefer a proof written to explain, rather than simply to derive the conclusion. A little exposition here and there can go a long way towards showing others the relationships you see. I am hardly innocent here, though!

I do need to work out a good way of writing proofs in LaTeX. It feels like mine always get compressed into a paragraph of math symbols. Maybe I just need to focus on writing a sentence or two of exposition per step and make one paragraph per conceptual step.