I definitely understand that, though I am a bit surprised to see MSR papers being referenced often in an RL workshop. I don't quite remember any RL papers of theirs that weren't strongly theoretical (other than that HRL paper by Hoang et Daume). I'm also a PhD student that until recently was doing RL, but have become tired of working in a field that's moving this fast and seems to be taking a'fast science' approach. It feels almost impossible to have any sort of real impact. I'm also just bored with reading RL papers, about 10% of the time I spend reading them is understanding the novelty, and the rest studying their experimentation to get a feel for whether it's worth anything.