[KCFforecast]

I think you have emphasized the main point: a lot of work for a low reward. Research is more above exploring the state of the art and new venues, divulgation and graphics is more akin to book sellers (for example Nielsen open science, and other interesting books, but for young researcher the most important and rewarding goal is to publish.

[legel]

I think it depends on what type of researcher you are. In every field there are always authoritative leaders who are comfortable writing "survey papers", which is perhaps most comparable to what the "research distiller" is all about. Except, these guys know from experience that visualization of complexity is perhaps the most direct way of communicating to the brain... and the real-time interactive nature of such technologies is far beyond "book sellers", and more into how you can imagine the future of human communication more generally approaching (perhaps with support of real-time speech recognition and graphics generation AI, e.g.)... but I digress - this is most certainly a fantastic move in the right direction for the research community at large, and especially for the machine learning community where so much is happening so fast, and we really do need people to stop and help us "distill". :) I have fond memories of finally understanding LSTMs based on Christopher Olah's blog, and if we can somehow scale this up and out in other areas, I'll gladly invest time and money and energy into helping pursue the bigger opportunities here...