[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[emjay]

Then there's also the issue, I don't know whether this is valid or not, that it seems philosophers aren't necessarily always even making an argument, that could be reduced to such a logical form, more just making observations and asking questions, which may eventually feed into an argument, but don't necessarily do so in their own right, thus making it even harder to discern what is relevant when trying to reduce a large body of text to a simple logical argument.

This is certainly fair. There are different kinds of philosophical texts, with different ambitions. 

This seems to be the case right from the start. Plato's conversations bring up various ideas and possible answers which are discussed and then put aside. His characters tell myths to illustrate what an answer would be like, without actually giving an answer. 

This frustrates people who expect every text to be like a science book, with the answers written out in simple declarative sentences and little blocks of text inset in the page to define the hard words. But, as with all good books, Plato demands that we use our brains to their very limit, and his texts' value lies largely in that they have provoked inconclusive conversation for a very long time.

I'm not saying I don't appreciate that... indeed it was very inspiring to see the passion of the YouTube teacher I was watching in that philosophy playlist, when he talked about his ongoing joy reading Plato... like layers of an onion, such that every single time he read through it, he'd learn something new or see something from a new perspective... basically that it just kept giving... and I experienced that to some extent for myself reading it. So I'm not saying I wish Plato was in a different, simpler form, or that all philosophy was in that simpler form... that's not what I'm saying at all... indeed it would be very boring if it were all the same, especially since philosophical texts are or can be deeply personal/idiosyncratic views into the way people perceive and think about the world, and different writing styles are part of that. I'm just saying that due to my own limitations, I have more difficulty parsing some writing styles than others, when it comes to actually trying to extract arguments, including difficulty zeroing in on the right level of detail (ie determining what's relevant to the argument and/or the context), but that doesn't mean I want the source material to change, just at most my own ability to parse it.

Aristotle, arguably, is more in line with what modern people want. He doesn't use myth or allegory, he tries to build up declarative statements into logical arguments to arrive at clear conclusions. So he's a model for some later types, and you can categorize people into Plato types and Aristotle types. Both can be fantastically difficult. And this is not made any easier by the fact that some people (Nietzsche and Adorno, among others) think that writing their ideas in simple, third-grade level sentences, would actually contradict their ideas, and argue tacitly against them. Oversimplifying is falsifying. If the "medium is the message," then a difficult medium is an important part of the meaning.

Modern people tend to forget that there are other ways of constructing a text besides the way that a science book or a good newspaper article is written.

That's an interesting point I've never heard before. But again I'd say the same as above; it's not that I would wish the source material itself to change, just at most my own reading comprehension/parsing abilties. So I can fully accept that 'the medium [can be] the message' or that 'oversimplifying [can be] falsifying', whether that be the dialogues of Plato, or Shakespeare like GN mentioned earlier; something would basically get lost in the translation from original form to simplified/modern (or extracted) form, it would be like lossy compression in computing terms ;-)... or similar to poetry, where the words used are meant to evoke multiple meanings etc, and in their case, probably any change at all would destroy their original meaning.