We ask: why is the literature on charge-transfer (CT) mechanisms in organic systems such a shitshow? There are so many different terms for different types of potential mechanisms: tunneling, hopping, but then also superexchange, and resonant tunneling, and multi-step tunneling, coherent hopping, electron delocalization etc etc. Are there likely this many different mechanisms governing the charge transport in organic systems? The answer is definitely not, and a lot of these actually pick out the same fundamental mechanism but just use different terminology because their results were a little different when they ran the experiment.
You have many different groups under pressure from funding sources to publish. This puts a time crunch on things, and you should just get your results out one way or another.
But, you don't want to step on the toes of another published person in the field who might review your manuscript, so you use different terminology. you avoid really pitting your results against their framework, and just use different words, and that wont offend them.
As a result, there isn't a collective effort by the community to converge on a single unified explanation, but rather the opposite force to avoid each other as much as possible to just publish without problems.
So the answer is: the social organization between researchers, journals, and funding sources.
Short term solution: write a review that goes over all the terms for different CT mechanisms, and what different major groups mean by them. And then you can distinguish (for example) superexchange vs superexchange', where the latter is how the XXX group uses the term which is completely different than the traditional technical meaning.
Long term solution: Rearrange the social dynamic of this deadly triangle. How would you do it?
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