And for good reason. This type of research routinely sets out to prove something that is already obvious. When was the last time you saw an evolutionary psychology paper that provided a surprising new insight?
How is it "already obvious"? We're told that men are visually oriented, but women are not. There are websites like "hot chicks with douchebags", and there are drop-dead gorgeous women married to complete toads who happen to be wealthy or powerful. Both of your comments are nihilistic dismissals of useful and interesting science on the specious grounds that "we already knew that". No we didn't, and even if we did, it's useful to prove it. Just because we had a hunch something was true doesn't mean it's so, and looking into the seemingly obvious can surprise us when it turns out that what we thought we knew was wrong.
It's "already obvious" because women do, in fact, go for attractive men (witness the swooning your wife or girlfriend does whenever there's a picture of George Clooney, Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp around). They find them sexually attractive, just like men find pretty women sexually attractive.
What confuses your argument is that women also tend to go for long term relationships with men that are high status and in such cases seem to place less importance on looks.
This leads to situations where the wife of a scrawny and unnatractive alpha male (the emperor of Rome, say) will bear children who bear a suspicious resemblance to a particularly hunky albeit lower status male from her surroundings (a beefy member of the Praetorian guard, say).
Which is exactly what this paper is saying: women differentiate between sexual attractiveness and desirability for marriage, but when it comes to judging sexual attractiveness, looks win out.
It's a matter of debunking and dismissing, publicly, the misinformation that obscures this fact.
I'd be interested in analyses of the sources and purposes of this misinformation.
(As a man,) the first time I met a women who was very direct and frank about her experience of attraction and motivation, it was eye opening. Not entirely easy to take, but very elucidating.
So much of the "common", "public" information in (U.S.) society about attraction and mating is just plain bunk. Yet it persists.
The paper itself (even in the abstract) acknowledges that we already know that women are visually oriented, though, in the sense that attractiveness is related to receptivity to sexual propositions. The paper is a somewhat more modest investigation of whether facial attractiveness in particular is also predictive (it is), and does a decent survey of some of the issues and related literature.
When it comes to human sexual behaviour, pretty much everything is possible, and it seems like anything that you can imagine actually exists.
That's why you see dismissive comments like the original one: many people who has been 'working in the field', so to speak, have already observed this, and see no value in his paper.