I don't think I can justify my claim that these sorts of problems have no connection to reality at all; perhaps a better claim is that these problems are a very inefficient way of making headway on problems that we care about, even if we extrapolate into the far future.

Upvoted for correctly understanding the issue (even while taking a position opposite to mine).

For what it's worth, I was extremely surprised that you listed, of all things, enumerative combinatorics (i.e. counting things) as an example of a branch of mathematics with a "tenuous" connection to "reality".