Comment by tovej

I have a similar experience. We had a truly terrible paper written as a collaboration with a team from the US on a software project, integrating their "novel" and "innovative" component. The component took 1 hour to compile, the architecture made no sense, and the US professor constantly talked about nothing but high-flying marketing concepts. I managed to hack together a demo using their component, fixing build bugs and design flaws (the ones I could do something about).

The proof of concept worked, but it wasn't doing anything new. We were just doing what we used to do, but now this terrible component was involved in it, making everything slower and more complicated.

Somehow that became a paper, and somehow this paper passed review without a single comment (my feeling is it's because of the professor's name recognition). I'm ashamed to have my name on that paper.