It's a valid point - if the failure cases aren't realistic they're not relevant. I would rather have an interesting paper with a colloquialism or two thrown in

It's a valid point - if the failure cases aren't realistic they're not relevant. I would rather have an interesting paper with a colloquialism or two thrown in than yet another tiny methods variation paper written in Proper Academese. And by the looks of it this is basically a white paper or long, footnoted blog post in PDF form, not a submission to Nature.