I disagree with this uncharitable view of the paper. First, an important missing point is that the protocol does not require trusted setup. In contrast, most p

I disagree with this uncharitable view of the paper. First, an important missing point is that the protocol does not require trusted setup. In contrast, most prior works require that parties hold threshold secret keys (necessitating a trusted third-party or expensive setup procedure). Second, a lot of effort is currently being poured into the transition to post-quantum. So having a post-quantum secure protocol is evidently valuable to a lot of people. Third, Byzantine agreement protocols usually always assume pairwise private and authenticated communication channels. It makes sense that protocols should not need to concern themselves with the communication layer and such channels can be realized from standard cryptographic building blocks anyways. Here the paper not using any PK-cryptography is especially nice because the protocol can be layered on top without a lot of fuss—no matter what the channels are based on. Last, this problem is far from "made up". It was an obvious (and also seemingly hard to solve) to people working in this area. Also, Byzantine agreement is a practically important problem and this is an elegant solution.