The comments to this are a bit wild to me. As a microbiologist, the main text of the paper usually contains the entire story for me —and yes, it should be a story! If you can’t tell me the point of your study, then I am unlikely to dig around for hours to figure out the point.

The methods are always(?) easily available by either by clicking the link, or sometimes the pdf versions contain everything. For one of my latest papers the full methods were much, much longer than allowed word count.