The main selling point is that reduction and "boring simplicity" can lead to a formally correct program, or at least one where most errors are caught by static analysis/type checking/etc.

I'm not saying it's not worth while, I'm just saying that it's not the goal (in general. Some academic exercises might have goals such as that because the point is to learn).

It's sort of like saying the goal of owning a store is to match inventory to sales as closely as possible. That's a strategy or sub-goal towards reaching the real goal at best, which is to make enough money that the store pays for itself and hopefully supports the owner. Some stores don't even have inventory, so that strategy doesn't even apply to them. Similarly, that programming strategy may not apply well to some problems (and some problems cannot be proven formally correct, at least in whole).

My original reply was really just meant to point out that what they viewed as the goal of programming, is really just one of many competing strategies for producing software, and many others don't care about that at all.