Unfortunately most researchers do not consider attack vectors and often consider inputs that do not meet their preferred examples to be invalid. If a hostile user is able to pollute the cache so that it significantly degrades then that exploit becomes an easy denial of service attack. It is somewhat out of scope, but means that more general robust algorithms are needed because most users won't fine tune a system for a bespoke algorithm and instead take an off-the-shelf solution. I am therefore not a big fan of these minor tweaks to historical algorithms by making a one or two line change and therefore only slightly modifying what it is good or bad at. I try for more holistic solutions, even if a small percent worse in some cases, and infuse randomness to avoid deterministic exploits. To me that's more worthwhile and a big factor in whether it is a research toy or production-grade engineering.