[scott00]

I think what this work does is establish a new, and lower, upper bound on the number of points that need to be explored in order to find an exact solution.

From some of your other replies it looks to me like you're confusing that with an improved bound on the value of the solution itself.

It's a little unclear to me whether this is even a new solution algorithm, or just a better bound on the run time of an existing algorithm.

I will say I agree with you that I don't buy the reason given for the lack of practical impact. If there was a breakthrough in practical solver performance people would migrate to a new solver over time. There's either no practical impact of this work, or the follow on work to turn the mathematical insights here into a working solver just haven't been done yet.