[JadeNB]

> Surely if the technique is so powerful, there ought to be easy examples of it aplenty.

Whatever your field of expertise, I suspect that you'll find in it that it is not always true that powerful techniques have any easy examples, let alone plenty of them. (This is definitely true in mathematics, where, often, the prerequisites needed even to define the objects we discuss can be so overwhelming that even many expert mathematicians don't encounter the objects seriously until late graduate school, or afterwards. Every mathematician has their own threshold for when "powerful but difficult" becomes "meaningless abstraction," which, by pure coincidence, usually happens to coincide with the threshold between "used in my research" and "not yet useful to me.")