Speaking for NLP in particular, and based on my experience, one doesn't publish in conferences "as a matter of principle". One does it because it's how everyone

Speaking for NLP in particular, and based on my experience, one doesn't publish in conferences "as a matter of principle". One does it because it's how everyone else in the field works. No one I know in the NLP field cares about Nature - if you want to get the broadest audience, you submit to one of the ACL conferences. The one problem I'm aware of is those who want to get positions in universities that don't know how the field works, because their selection committees tend to complain that you have no journal papers. If that's your plan then you can submit to journals such as CL. But again, that's not where the broadest audience is.