And I'm not convinced that's publishable in any sort of competitive journal.
I wholeheartedly agree with the vast majority of your comment. However, I take issue with this last sentence. A novel technique is worth publishing even if it is only used in a pilot study of questionable value. Now, anyone can take the technique and expand it to a far greater number of search terms. They can also attempt address potential drawbacks of the technique (as you have done) in future studies.
My decision to use the weasel word "competitive" there was based on very much this point. My reading of the article suggested that this author was submitting his article to fairly prestigious journals: two of the three were "a classic physics journal... [whose rejection letter was] signed by a very famous physicist" and "a really famous journal".
The other was merely "a reputable physics journal" (whose editorial board had to spend time soliciting papers), which sounds like a more reasonable target. I'm not saying he should have been trying to publish work like this in a journal that has no standards and will print anything, but I think it needs to be aimed at a journal whose rejections are primarily for lack of quality rather than for lack of importance.
And a non-physics journal at that level, in particular.
I wholeheartedly agree with the vast majority of your comment. However, I take issue with this last sentence. A novel technique is worth publishing even if it is only used in a pilot study of questionable value. Now, anyone can take the technique and expand it to a far greater number of search terms. They can also attempt address potential drawbacks of the technique (as you have done) in future studies.