Venu: And if people (including Brooks) have actually used the architecture for building robots, that at least must be clear proof that there is a real architecture here.

The problem is, almost any AI idea you can think of can be made to work on a few examples, so working on a few examples isn't evidence that there's anything there. The deadly words are "now we just have to scale it up".

derekz: I think subsumption is still popular amongst students and hobbyists.

That is, popular amongst people repeating for themselves the toy examples that other people have used it for already.