Exactly. That's why we should be (IMO) focusing on hard face recognition problems, full of rotation and occlusion and blur and all the "icky" parts of the real

Exactly. That's why we should be (IMO) focusing on hard face recognition problems, full of rotation and occlusion and blur and all the "icky" parts of the real world that we don't like to deal with. There is some of that work going on out there, but I would be very surprised to find that spirit in a paper with the words "LFW" in the title. It's just a different focus. In its time, LFW was "hard" since most of the face datasets (FERET, AT&T) were completely controlled: the subject visited a laboratory, sat down in the best pose, made the best face expression, and had their picture taken by the best camera that grant funding could buy. The "in the wild" part of "Labeled Faces in the Wild" alludes to the fact that these are more real-world than what the community was used to. It's time to continue that train of thought and move on to something harder though.