[newrotik]

Worked quite a bit in the field of mathematical optimization, more towards the SWE side of implementing and deploying systems for actual usage for the past ~decade rather than the theoretical end / designing new algorithms.

In many cases, it would have been better to think about solutions from solvers as "good first drafts" for actual usage, and instead of investing very significant amounts of time improving on models and algorithms, spend time developing a good UI/UX that would make it easy for human operators to do the necessary rectifications.

In the article's case, it was possible to fix the issue with a relatively simple modification to the model. I have seen, many times, practitioners of math optimization trying to "fix" their model by adding more and more features to it, leading to horribly complex, nonlinear messes that would never be of much use in practice.