As with all things bitcoin, I am hesitant to chime up in the discussion without doing more research, but I have also always had the feeling that transaction processing is not properly incentivized. There are (at least) two major operations in the bitcoin network: currency generation and transaction processing. I think the generation part is remarkably viable, and well conceived, especially in this nascent stage.

But while transaction processing costs money to perform, it does not seem to be incentivized properly. While there are concrete rewards for generating currency, there is no corresponding concrete and immediate reward for processing the transaction, and voting in transaction approvals. This might be a real obstacle in general acceptance, and some of the root cause behind all of the "so where can I use this" kind of questions we hear all the time.

In this case, I believe that these researchers seem to have found a structural imperfection causing a block where there should be a flow. The health of this community really depends on identifying all such cases.