> I mention this because I've been hearing "Yeah, well, that opinion/study is completely invalid because it used a six month old tool. Today's release of SOMNOS 6.9 (Pinnacle Snoozytime) has totally changed the game!" every six months for what feels like the past five years now.

Given my own conclusion that it's not possible for conventional academic research to accurately snapshot industrial adoption of this technology, I would expect this pattern to continue for a while until either academia becomes much faster or technology progress slows down (or both). This just isn't yet a situation where you can rely on published papers telling you what to think -- you still need to mix in a bit of your own instinct and experience and extrapolation to get an accurate up-to-date read, even if there's some prediction error as a result.