Thanks, this is a pet peeve of mine. Theoretical bounds are all nice and such, and it's cool if you can prove a better running time using some algorithm, but if it doesn't actually perform better in practice most of the time then it's not really worth much. I blame computer scientists who are in a rush to publish the best theoretical solution but never bother to consider whether it has practical impacts. Also textbooks who blithely claim you can do better with such and such a data structure using a certain algorithm.
See this StackOverflow question for some nice insights: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/504823/has-anyone-actual...