I interview regularly and I'm really keen to know if the person knows about time-space tradeoff. DP 'like' algorithms lend themselves well to evaluate this. Note that I say DP 'like' because I'm essentially looking for them to say memoization and implement it. And this doesn't really take a crazy DP optimization algorithm to evaluate this concept. And note that this time-space kind of tradeoff is something we indeed encounter regularly; e.g., caching (to avoid n/w call or computation), pre-computation etc.,

So the concept underlying DP is quite useful and it's premature to dismiss it as something that never comes up in the real world.

That said, I understand that it's easy to push this and go down the path of more and more esoteric algorithms.