Why do we say these things?

Why do computer scientists acquiesce in publishing things we know aren't right?

Take, for example, a paper in the latest JODI describing The PlumbingXJ Approach for Fast Prototyping of Web Applications. The paper looks mildly interesting, although it ignores a decade of important work in hypertext structure. But lets look at the motivation (section 3):

If you read and review computer science papers, you'll see homespun homilies like this all the time. I'm not unsympathetic, The only problems is: we know this is untrue.

• Lots of important and successful Web sites and hypermedia applications have been developed by people who have no background in software engineering at all.
• If you write down a list of hypermedia pioneers, how many software engineers do you find? If you write down a list of topflight Web designers, how many software engineers do you find?
• Software engineering is not the core competence of leading Web design agencies. Firms with lots of software engineering chops have not established much of a beachhead in Web design.
• As the Agile/Extreme Programming movement has called into question whether software engineering is essential for developing software, is it prudent to claim that it is essential for developing hypermedia?
• The footnote appears to offer a source of evidence to back the claim. It does not; it's entirely rhetorical.

In other words, the authors got carried away here, and the editors and peer reviewers didn't bother to check.