TITLE: Why do I find Category Theory mostly just a way to make simple things difficult?
QUESTION [14 upvotes]: I have a basic working knowledge of category thoery since I do research in programming languages and typed lambda-calculus.  Indeed, I have refereed many papers in my area based on category theory.
But, in doing this refereeing, and in reading many important categorial papers in my area, I simply find the terminology and presentation style extremely opaque compared to style that I prefer which instead emphasizes logic inference rules and extensions of the lambda calculus.
Given the (extended) Curry-Howard Isomorphism between programming languages, logics, and categories, it's clear that I can understand the concepts I need by mapping category theory into the other two.  But, am I missing something in the process, or are the papers I'm refereeing just making things more difficult than they need to be?

REPLY [19 votes]: I think the other answers miss one aspect of this question.  Mathematicians vary in how they do math. Some are "syntactic thinkers" (maybe you), some are "conceptual", and some are "geometric" in the way they think.  That is the way Leone Burton's book Mathematicians as Enquirers: Learning about Learning Mathematics., Kluwer, 2004, analyzes it.  Others take geometric and conceptual to be variations of the same category, and different names are used for the categories, too.  
People are different, and in how they think about abstract ideas they are different in a very deep way.  That is my own experience in both my research career in and teaching.  I took logic from Joe Shoenfield (which gives me a respectable background!) and did work in abstract algebra and then discovered category theory and thought: Way to go!  That is because I think primarily conceptually.
Mike Barr said that to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  I keep translating problems into categorical language.  You go the other way.  These differences run deep, and should be taken into account when reading other people's stuff.