[rcxdude]

Well, yeah. It takes a heck of a long time to pull something out of the lab, let alone theory, into the real world, and there's a ton of ways that it can die along the way. But you do need people to be pursuing these things to actually get something into production, else there really would never be any progress. To me this reaction feels a bit of a misunderstanding about why it's worth discussing these ideas at all: it's not meant to be a forecast of where technology is definitely going in the future, it's a potential direction that some people think is worth pursuing, and even if the odds are low for any given idea it doesn't make them worthless. (I've worked for near 10 years to turn something that 'worked in the lab' when I joined into an actual product, for example, and it's still not quite standing on its own feet in production yet).

I'm not familiar enough with the space to know how this idea rates compared to alternative options at similar levels of development: the density is obviously extreme (but probably not the biggest advantage), and it makes sense to me that the underlying physics could work robustly, but the practicalities of how you read and write seem pretty difficult (and I think the paper kind of glosses over this: read caching and defect mapping could be trickier than it implied. Accessing the tape from both sides also seems like it will make the engineering more difficult).