There are many really excellent papers out there - the kind which will save you hours/months of work (or even make things that were previously inviable to build

There are many really excellent papers out there - the kind which will save you hours/months of work (or even make things that were previously inviable to build viable). That said, it is amazing how terrible a lot of papers are; people are pressured to publish and therefore seem to get into weird ruts trying to do what they think will be published, rather than what is intellectually interesting...