I agree with both points. I think our time could be best spent focusing on improving the already proven novelty and utility of Gridcoin - Minting a currency based on work done for external entities. There are plenty of issues to work on.

• New users need to get their ERR without being forced into a pool
• Stats gathering needs to be decentralized and made to scale
• Superblocks need to be prepared for expansion outside of solely BOINC (not any time soon, but we need to start thinking about it)
• Account verification (beacons) need to be improved

Not to mention that we still have some base processes to work out:

• Poll parameters
• Voting weight
• Treasury creation
• Treasury distribution
• Development path consensus

These are off the top of my head so there could be more, or some of these could already be solved and it's just late and I'm not thinking straight = ).

The question I ask myself is:

While PoR is an amazing concept that may become reality in the future, why attempt to invent something that we don't immediately need -- a new blockchain security mechanism -- when we have so much else to do?

Who knows. Maybe by working on one of these more straight forward tasks, a solution to the PoR issues raised here will come to light.

With regards to marketing, I think that any resource that wants to be seen as an official source of information should not use the term "Proof of Research." We do not currently use PoR as a protocol and even if we vote to explore its development further, it is not likely that we will use it again for some time.