It often takes some knowledge of the field to really appreciate the contribution a paper is making. 

In most journals, the authors are allowed to assume that the reader already has  field-specific knowledge. So, the author doesn't necessarily include all the background information needed to really appreciate the contribution. If you read the paper without understanding this context, it will probably seem boring or not useful to you.

Of course, it's always appreciated when authors _do_ express clearly why their contribution is interesting and important. But if it's widely understood in the field that a given problem is important, then the author probably isn't going to waste too much precious space repeating what most readers already know.



If a paper is published in a very good good journal (one that is sufficiently good that it doesn't need to accept boring papers to fill issues), that means *somebody* (reviewer, editor) thought its contributions would be interesting, novel, and/or useful to a nontrivial subset of the journal's audience.

But, this doesn't mean that the paper is interesting to everyone. 

<sub>I am sure somebody can think of a paper that was accepted only for e.g., political reasons, and is genuinely, objectively unimportant. These are rare enough that I don't think these are the papers you are asking about.</sub>