Pardon I didn't notice your comment earlier - unfortunately, you don't get notices when someone replies to top-level articles as it's done for replies to comments.

The difference you have in mind is basically the same as what I meant when I wrote about areas that are infested with a lot of bullshit work, but still fundamentally sound. Clearly CS people are smart and possess huge practically useful knowledge and skills -- after all, it's easy for anyone who works in CS research in an institution of any prominence to get a lucrative industry job working on very concrete, no-nonsense, and profitable projects. The foundations of the field are therefore clearly sound and useful.

This however still doesn't mean that there aren't entire bullshit subfields of CS, where a vast research literature is produced on things that are a clear dead-end (or aimed at entirely dreamed-up problems) while everyone pretends and loudly agrees that great contributions are being made. In such cases, the views expressed by the experts are seriously distant from reality, and it would be horribly mistaken to make important decisions by taking them at face value. People who work on such things are of course still capable of earning money doing useful work in industry, but that's only because the sort of bullshit that they have to produce must be sophisticated enough and in conformity with complex formal rules, so in order to produce the right sort of bullshit, you still need great intellectual ability and lots of useful skills.

You may be right that I should have perhaps made a stronger contrast between such fields and those that are rotten to the bottom.