NeurIPS should be about fundamental science not about applied science and engineering solutions for specific domains.

Science vs applications would be actually a good way to divide NeurIPS into two conferences to get focus back: NeurIPS and Applied NeurIPS. One wold present science, the other tweaks, tricks and methods to solve everyday problems.

Papers like "Partially Encrypted Deep Learning using Functional Encryption", "Dancing to Music", "Differentiable Cloth Simulation for Inverse Problems" would go go the engineering conference for the "most people".