An independent program committee makes these calls and had to pick from 166 submissions. The program committee picks talks that are insightful and technically challenging.
Regarding Landoops proposal. This was not about KCQL but SQL on Streams, also named KSQL which is integrated with their new product Kafka Lenses. We'll look at Confluents SQL and see which one to go forward with, maybe both but we have happy customers using our version.
But congratulations on your KSQL very nice! We (Landoop and DM staff) have proved many ex colleagues in the Investment bank world wrong about Kafka and this cements our decisions to use it. Thanks.