Well, first of all, I take it that you have already decided not to bother with Heidegger.
And, with everything after and before.
Look, Mike:
Every committed thinker is scientific.
Either that, or you are painting the respondent to your question into a corner from which he cannot be extricated...
As if those who study Heidegger are not scientific.
"Massively reified abstraction" is another way to say "your life," Mike.
Now, I understand that persons of the ilk to self-describe as "scientifically committed" find comfort in a sterile distance from any living/breathing/feeling subject, and so the subject of "life," espcially their own, is reduced to "embodiment."
Now there is nothing at all wrong with coming to grips with embodiment,
any more than there is in understanding the extended mind.
However, when this move insulates a person from the mortal urgency inherent in his condition,
 especially considering the state of affairs in which we all are increasingly embroiled,
this step into embodiment is a step away from the blood and guts of the political animal's highest potential,
and is already one step too far, from a Heideggerrian (deeply Aristotelian) perspective.

See, I study Heidegger not to learn
so much as to remember...
Remember the insights that flash and pass in the noise of the day to day, insights that are root Philosophy.
Now, I am a Socratic, and
Socrates was famous for holding that the unexamined life is not worth living.
How do you feel about your own?
I figure you feel it better spent than those committedly unscientific Phenomenologists who spend all their time thinking about Being (alive).
But, what is it that you are really examining?
Something else, altogether...

If not, then, reading Heidgger would be like remembering.
Not so difficult, only insight in need of a nudge...
Not a "massively reified abstraction" at all, but the space between your eyes and ears, birth and death.
And, the chisel with which the future is carved.
No "body" is going to do that for us...

Heidegger was (not so famous) for holding that 'only he who understands is able to listen.'
Point being that, if you can't hear what he is saying then you do not understand,
and you do not understand because you do not examine your own life.
Which, in my book, means you haven't done your homework.
And, you aren't doing Philosophy.

Which isn't to say that the only way to do Philosophy, or live Philosophically, is to study Heidegger.
But, that, if and when you do, then Heidegger is not or will not be so difficult to study.
Instead, you will like it,
it will feel like a converasation with family,
and you might find the utility in a clear exposition of life's most important things so easily hidden under so much modern quibble.