Comment by thraw_oway

The question is: which other things, and why?

One problem of this new millennium is that the field has developed a tendency to do old things with new languages instead of doing new things with old languages.

Reinventing another polygonal wheel approximation while constantly tweaking the theory used serves to segregate the experienced (who may have trouble accepting such tweaks or their necessity - they already know about the existence of wheels anyway) from the newbies (who have no previous intuitions and no taste for legitimate and spurious novelty).

Newbies are cheap, and new ideas are hard. Let's do some mental rent seeking.