I think this is a "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" thing, where you might be better off with something else, but don't want to be the guy who picked the something else if things go wrong.
This is great though. The speedups advertised for using the recommended number of rounds is important (2x or more in some cases). While you don't want to be the guy "who picked it wrong," picking some arbitrarily high number isn't right either, and going about it scientifically as in the paper is the right way to go.
At some point, for people optimizing things at large scale, it's possible they will want to look at these round reductions, and the type of education needed to make this kind of judgement call goes way beyond "nobody got fired for choosing IBM"...