I provide raw data for some news services and that data could be shown as tables or simple dashboards that are faster to read for users, but my customers insist in generating as much text as possible from, sometimes, 2 values.
The incentives are totally misaligned, news services try to get as much time from it's readers as possible. It's quite depressing.
Good data-to-text NLG applications not only summarise data but they also can provides insight into causal relations of why events occurred by leveraging domain knowledge.
I think NLG is really interesting, the problem is that there are incentives to create long form content that doesn't add any value to readers.
[1] "Quality" here meaning how it looks to Google's crawler, not actual quality content.
In particular at search time, google has a vested interest in limiting both the number of links to a particular domain and the occurrence of content farm links when Wikipedia would suffice. Content farms are pretty detectable in any objective relevance annotation workflow.