Unfortunately, beautiful things don't always make the best subjects for papers. Number
one, research must be original -- and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows,
the way to be sure you're exploring virgin territory is to stake out a piece of ground that
no one wants. Number two, research must be substantial -- and awkward systems yield
meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order
to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions.
Most of AI is an example of this rule; if you assume that knowledge can be represented as
a list of predicate logic expressions whose arguments represent abstract concepts, you'll
have a lot of papers to write about how to make this work. As Ricky Ricardo used to say,
"Lucy, you got a lot of explaining to do."
The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that
already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard
to convey in a research paper.