The sheer amount of material a student needs to digest in order to become conversant as even a pseudo-professional is enormous, which I think excuses, to some degree, the strange style of text books. I personally find that education is a process of emanations: first one digests the jargon and the mechanical activity of some subject (taking a dot product, in this case) and then one revisits the concepts with the distracting unfamiliarity of the technical accoutrements diminished by previous exposure. Thus able to digest the concepts better, the student can revisit the technical material again with a deeper appreciation of what is happening. The process repeats ad-infinitum until you ask yourself "what even IS quantum field theory?"
The intuition behind QFT isn't the problem. I'd argue its quite intuitive: write a classical field, assume some plausible commutation relations, turn the crank. To add interactions pretend that you observe the results at infinity or whatever and take some terms of a power series representing the amplitudes, adding a cut off which you calibrate with an experiment. All fine and dandy. Just sucks that the machinery doesn't quite pass a combination of mathematical rigor and philosophical substance.
