Every author who uses "it went over the audience's head" as an excuse deserves to be beaten with his own keyboard until he is no longer capable of inflicting his nonsense on the rest of us. The first, most basic, and most important responsibility of an author is to make a clear and engaging story. And that is where all the talent lies. Any asshole can write a bunch of gibberish that makes multilingual puns, or references Platonic theory of forms, or something. I could dash off page after page of that slop on any given Tuesday. The real trick is to make the idea so clear to the audience that understanding it doesn't even feel like work. That's what actually distinguishes good writers from poor ones. Good writers don't write to show off how smart they are, they write to get a point across, in the clearest and most accessible language that can still contain the idea. "It went over the audience's head" isn't an excuse at all. It's a confession. A confession that the author sucks at throwing. Your work should not need the audience to have read volumes six through seventeen of the Sermons of St. Ungo the Well-Endowed, in the original Aramaic. Instead, it should make the actual idea clearly understandable to people who have never heard of St. Ungo, and never will. The nature of the point you were trying to get across is utterly immaterial if you fail to actually do so. Will everyone understand you? Inevitably no. Lots of people out there, and they are all different. But if your message doesn't land on a large portion of your target audience, that's on you.