I'm an Engineer (not a scientist) not sure how much is applicable to other fields but when I've been interested in what the "current state of topic X is" I have looked for recently published thesis on the topic, a good thesis will have summarized the papers for me (gone through all the churn of papers and highlighted the key points).

I think this is kind of what the author attempted to build (i.e. something that spits out the Literature review portion of a thesis.)

I think that's probably why graduate students were excited - they are the people who have to write a thesis at the end of the day.