For now I'm going to give more weight to the project that keeps making interesting progress in public. There's the old saying -- if an expert says something is possible, they're probably right; if they say something is impossible, they are probably wrong.
OTOH lapped encoding is nothing new, and it may be that once you increase the complexity of the encoder a lot of the advantage disappears. Contrariwise, it may be that with the targeted decoding complexity of a decade ago, lapped transforms were a net loss, but with the higher complexity that is allowable today it's a net win.
I agree that their progress in public is quite interesting, and completely aside from that, Monty keeps on generating high-quality, free, accessible articles and videos about various topics involved in digital signal processing that I love being able to point interested students at.
