Maybe a better term should be "blind" rather than black-box. I think the goal is simply to hold optimization to the same level of reproducibility that is expect

Maybe a better term should be "blind" rather than black-box. I think the goal is simply to hold optimization to the same level of reproducibility that is expected of most scientific fields today, and if a researcher is allowed to introduce a hundred tunable parameters that makes their algorithm converge on all the standard test cases then they haven't created a reproducible optimizer - they have created a benchmark solver.