[LBTables]

> In my field of robotics there are SOOO many papers that are basically taking three or four established algorithms/machine learning models, and applying them to off-the-shelf hardware.

This is a direct result of the aggressive "publish or perish" system. I worked as an aide in an autonomous vehicles lab for a year and a half during my undergrad, and while the actual work we were doing was really cool cutting edge stuff, it was absolutely maddening the amount of time we wasted blatantly pulling bullshit nothing papers exactly like you describe out of our asses to satisfy the constant chewing out we got that "your lab has only published X papers this month".