our paper to a database venue about bringing GPU support to Presto was rejected. one of the reviewers wrote, and I quote verbatim: "the topic of the paper is too practical". I just couldn't help but laughed at it.
Or perhaps they wanted something theoritical that advances the state of the art in database design and architecture (which is the whole purpose of academic reasearch/conference/etc) - not merely some report describing doing something that's already been done for a different DB.
Condescending? That's the mission of a scientific journal / conference / etc. Doesn't mean practical development work is "less worthy", but it's not a fit for them.
I disagree. I think it's very important to see how can those papers be turned into real things. Rejecting something for too practical is a joke, and if I ever find out who gave us that review, I'll have a talk with them.