I guess I'll come down somewhere in between you and the other commenters so far. I don't find Austen that hard to read (I do have a 55' UHD display for a monitor, so I can get a lot of text on the screen with very large characters), but I don't think it's necessary to copy everything about Jane Austen's style even when writing Regency fanfic - in fact, part of the fun of fanfic is seeing other people's choices, both in the variations and how they relate them. I would (and do) find it a bit jarring when the upper class characters regularly use contractions in their speech - my impression is they didn't do that during the period and you certainly don't see it in P&P - but choices about how much to put in a paragraph seems perfectly fair to me. And while I am a huge fan, the punctuation in my copies of P&P often follows no apparent logic and I am guessing she was responsible (although perhaps it was the typesetter).
