It's not at all clear that doing what the papers say is optimal. Whether or not it is an open question and depends very much on the context.
Trainers of world class olympic athletes do read papers but they also do a lot of things that aren't yet backed up by papers or differ from what's written in papers.
In web design the correct approach is often to run a A/B test instead of simply trusting that the solution that performed well in other contexts will perform.
Most successful artists don't read academic papers on aesthetics. The develop their skills differently. The post argues to choose a different approach to the problem than the best experts on the topic use. That's not something that you should simply label as "optimal".
So I'm working for a friend's company at the moment (friend is a small business owner who designs websites and a bit of an entrepreneur) anyway, I've persuaded him that we should research the empirical literature on what makes websites effective (which we've done a lot of now) and to advertise ourselves as being special by reason of doing this (which we're only just starting to do).
One thing that I found absolutely remarkable is how unfilled this space tends to be. Like a lot of things in the broad area of empirical aesthetics it seems like there are a lot of potentially useful results (c.f.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485842/ ), but they're simply not being applied- either as points of real practice or of marketing differentiation.
A fascinating gap.