Reddit reviews Advanced Macroeconomics

As an Economics PhD student, I agree with most of what you've written, but I'm not sure I would characterize the texts you recommend as introductory. Unfortunately, until the graduate level, most economics texts are lacking in formalism, largely because the undergraduates they are aimed at tend to lack background in mathematics. The texts written at the graduate level have the formalism, but presuppose a degree of familiarity with concepts and jargon.

The Mas-Collel is indeed the standard for formal micro, and I would direct the OP to Hirshleifer for a companion that fills in the background and intuitions that might be lacking in that text.

Macro is definitely less accessible, at least to me, but for a recommendation, I think basically everyone uses Romer as the first heavy-duty macro text right now. I can certainly share the sort of Socratic feeling towards macroeconomics, though, the more I learn about it the less I feel confident in saying about the world beyond the models.

Specifically, my focus is in applied econometrics, and I recommend Kennedy to everyone who expresses any interest in the topic. Kennedy employs an approach that I particularly enjoy, where he divides each section into thirds: one for an intuitive explanation, one for an overview of the math, and one for in depth consideration of the method and citations.

EDIT: I was looking over your comments about peppajac217's recommendation, and I scrolled down to examine them. I would second your advice about avoiding those texts, as they are Austrian pop-econ, and involve no formalism at all, making them particularly ill-suited to this request.

Romer's Advanced Macroeconomics is a pretty standard textbook that I bet you'll find in any future macro course you take. I think it's pretty clear and understandable.

For more mathematically heavy macro and Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibirum models, you should go for Ljunqvist & Sargent and/or Stokey, Lucas & Prescott. I know that at least in the former you have programming exercises and probably in the latter as well.

I think those are all very well known textbooks from very well known authors and they should fit what you're asking for.