The delineation between knowledge and intelligence is useful here.

Knowledge can occasionally get in the way of some tasks, such as a master illustrator trying to draw like a child. Or as you've mentioned, an expert trying to explain to a beginner.

Even so, I disagree with you about model progress on communication - maybe there's a little jaggedness between minor model versions, but Opus 5.5 is a much much better communicator than, say, Claude 3 Opus.