[blacksmithgu]

The issue is that novel paper ideas will be split across multiple years (and even multiple conferences), making it much harder to actually see the whole picture for a reader. Each little piece of the paper will often also be bloated with unnecessary extra detail in order to reach the threshold for "minimum publishable paper".

[grayclhn]

Splitting up a groundbreaking idea into so many papers that the idea is lost is 1) going beyond a “minimal publishable unit” and 2) not in the authors’ interest, since getting credit for a groundbreaking idea in a correspondingly prestigious outlet is much better than getting credit for 2 or 3 bad ideas. I’m sure there’s a level of novelty where 2 irrelevant papers is better for the author than 1 single paper, but I don’t think we should design academic publishing around slightly-better-than-mediocre contributions.

[holidaygoose]

Using the same code analogy as the parent, this is like code with unnecessary extra commenting. Seems okay to me.