We can look at technologies from two different points of view -- a engineers or as scientists. As engineers, we look at sha-3 as a practical means to an end --

We can look at technologies from two different points of view -- a engineers or as scientists. As engineers, we look at sha-3 as a practical means to an end -- just a secure hashing algorithm. From that point of view, its un-necessary as we already have sha-2. As scientists, it's an experiment and we're still waiting to see the results. The hypothesis is that its existence will strengthen our existing pool of hashing algorithms. We should note that this is a poor hypothesis; given that we don't see any flaws in our [only?] other algorithm, it's currently impossible to test. However; as with many other important experiments, we are seeing other un-expected results and applications. As an engineer, I acknowledge that it's probably best to skip it in most production applications. But as a scientist, let's not skip if anything cool happens down the line?