Thanks, enjoyed your response.

Your "tackling nastier problems" point is well-taken, and one reason I have a great deal of sympathy for work in these research areas.

I think that you're painting an overly-rosy picture of the benchmark situation, but you're right in that I was likely too critical. The attention paid to synthetic fitness landscapes, for example, is also a positive sign that that many researchers do care about issues of comparison and analysis.

(That said, I obviously believe that the field can and must do much better---and, since it relies so heavily on empirical evidence, its need for consistent methodology is somewhat higher.)