>Professionals who make a living doing work, even the ones who know more about the topic than the researchers, are not the target audience.

You know what's the shittiest spot to be in? A PhD student that's also one of those working class professionals. Can you imagine working on something you know represents a significant technical challenge in industry and then writing a paper on it and then it get rejected because it's "just engineering".

My personal favorite (ie in my area) is the original pytorch paper isn't publishable for this reason (but simultaneously is the highest cited - through it's arxiv orcid - ML compiler paper of all time).