It's funny to me that people are so quick to poo-poo the complicated modeling done for the Netflix prize. When did production-worthiness become the only important thing? It's like saying Watson was useless because it can't play a concurrent game of Jeopardy with thousands of people on the web.

Just like in research, it turns out that relaxing real-world constraints on a problem is often a great way to make progress. I would not have to search long or far to provide much worse uses of million-dollar grants/projects/big-data-software.