Fluff inflation in Essentials

So, I've been working on a little project merging my Essentials Options into the actual classes (stage zero of possibly throwing my hat into the 4E retro-clone ring) and one thing became quite obvious as I was formatting the material... Essentials padded things a heck of a lot more than even I thought they had.

My guess would have been that the Essentials layout and extra fluff text might have doubled the page count for the same amount of material, but putting the data into a Pre-Essentials format without the extra flavor text shrunk the Knight from 23 pages in HotFL to just FIVE pages of PHB1-ish formatted text (including the couple of paragraphs of opening fluff, a benefits by level table and my extra options).

Between this and my project to condense the feat list into a more manageable list without the obsolete/bad feats and being able to squeeze the entire HotFL/K list (all of which I consider good to excellent feats) into just a couple of pages its really making me appreciate just how crunch dense the Pre-Essentials material was (my suspicion is that, stripped of the excess fluff, the entire 'Heroes of X' line of hardbacks amounts to about what we'd have gotten in a single Pre-Essentials PHB style release).

I don't that this is much of a topic, but I wanted to share because I found it interesting. I'll probably make a seperate thread about my retro-clone concepts later today once I've got my work-related projects up and running.