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I agree it's more useful to make distinctions in classification than quality or inferred attitudes.
However, I wonder how mainstream Calvino intended to be when he wrote Cosmicomics and T Zero. And I also wonder whether perceptible modesty is the most important quality with which an ambitious writer should be concerned no matter what their classification. There's a certain enshrined ostentation in science fiction -- a look-at-me inventiveness -- which I don't mind at all. I think it's a positive attribute in books like Anathem. I also don't mind it when Pound interrupts the Cantos to say "I shall have to learn more Greek, but so shall you [the reader], drat you." Pound thought he was trying to save civilization when he wrote that. I'm glad he cared about civilization in the first place.
In other words, an eclectic vocabulary, latinate style or difficult system of reference is not necessarily a defect, nor need it be proven crucial to the work in which it is used to be tolerable. It's a feature and nothing more or less. If that writer happens to hear the work in that way and his work has that feature as a result, then sobeit. Eccentricity is not necessarily a defect, nor difficulty an affectation.
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