From my experience, my main criticism of research in the field of computer vision is that most of it is 'meh'. In a university that focused on security research, I saw mountains of research into detection/recognition, yet most of it offered no more than slightly different ways of doing the same old thing.

I also saw: a head of design school insisting that they and their spouse were credited on all student and staff movies, the same person insisting that massive amounts of school cash be spent promoting their solo exhibition that no one other than students attended, a chair of research who insisted they were given an authorship role on all published output in the school, labs being instituted and teaching hires brought in to support a senior admin's research interested (despite them not having any published output in this area), research ideas stolen from undergrad students and given to PhD students... I could go on all day.

If anyone is interested in how things got like this, you might start with Margret Thatcher. It was she who was the first to insist that funding of universities be tied to research. Given the state of British research in those days it was a reasonable decision, but it produced a climate where quantity is valued over quality and true 'impact'.