Small clarification: "state of the art" just means "the best currently available", not "a perfect and effective solution that handles all the problems and has a

Small clarification: "state of the art" just means "the best currently available", not "a perfect and effective solution that handles all the problems and has all the possbile functionality". So if no one has ever built a decoder of a certain quality level, that specific level can by definition not be "state of the art".