Comment by Strilanc

Glad you liked it.

Note the 2013 paper wasn't making the same point. They weren't pointing out that Shor's algorithm succeeds quickly regardless of how well the quantum computer works when factoring small numbers. They proved the period-matching "precompilation" tricks experimentalists were doing at the time weren't okay, because those tricks could turn any factoring problem into a trivial two qubit circuit (and were equivalent to knowing the factors).