We run into these kinds of issues quite often. I also majored in physics, but unlike you, I dropped out of my master's program (I just didn't have the talent. Given my generally limited intelligence, it was probably an inevitable outcome). From what I've read, the article seems to be arguing against the claim that because so many anomalies have accumulated in the field of GA, it's now ready to become a general purpose tool. Your argument appears to be that GA has been nicely organized as a standard library, essentially defining invalid states. So it's a high level abstraction perspective, but on the other hand, I think it could also be framed as a case against excessive abstraction. Interesting