But the thing is, those aren't disagreements. A disagreement is a claim that the cited researchers didn't find what they think they found; that essentially some of their results (perhaps all) are false. That does have a negative connotation; the "improvement" consists in uprooting some falsehood.

Improving on engineering is nonconflicting. The existence of an excavator doesn't refute the shovel, and so on.

A disagreement in, say, CS would be, "Foo Barley [42] mistakenly estimates an upper bound of O(n log n) on his algorithm; here we prove, in fact, a quadratic lower bound! Moreover, the algorithm calculates produces results in several cases that Foo Barley doesn't consider, presenting it as general."

How much of that do we see?