The problem with many phd's is that they don't understand how useless research papers are in most cases. You have very tight constraints and the algorithms written by researchers are almost never optimal, you have to do significant tweaks or reinvent it entirely to fit it into your constraints.

In this case you just linked a bunch of irrelevant papers that didn't solve the problem (pathfinding on an infinite and mutable map) and calling the developers ignorant for not looking at them. It is you who are ignorant thinking that you being a grad student means that you must know better than professionals, and also you lack reading comprehension since they didn't even claim their approach is new. This blog was not meant to contribute as a research paper, it was meant to show the community what improvements for the game they were working on.