First off, quoting Bruce is by definition a glimpse in history since Bruce has not had the opportunity to revise his opinions since 2006 when he passed away...
I did go back and checked out a few books from Bruce Fraser that I have. It has been a while I have looked at them, and I must say that I admired his writings. It would appear to me that Bruce's view point was certainly more comprehensive and not quite narrowly focused as it appears from some of the clippings of his writings quoted in this thread. However, it seems he was more interested in practical issues such as making profiles, etc., and not going into details of color science. But that is fine considering the audience he was targeting.
The fact that Adobe and the Photoshop engineers (who are a pretty smart group) haven't seen a reason or benefit from radically changing Photoshop's implementation of something is telling volumes...
I don't know why you think that if Photoshop is not doing something then it means they thought it was technically worthless. There are a few other reasons why industry doesn't do many things that seem technically "correct", which could be applicable here, and they are (1) if public is happy with a product then why unnecessarily change a product, and, (2), Photoshop is product that many (most??) people use to make visually pleasing images and not necessarily technically or scientifically correct images.
Consider an example: The NTSC coefficients for converting to grayscale, i.e., 0.299*R + 0.587*G + 0.114*B, are well-known. However, the R,G, and B used typically are
non-linear (gamma-corrected) and the coefficients {0.299, 0.587, 0.114}, actually are derived for
linear R, G and B. However, there is a certain amount of research NTSC did into why use the same coefficients even in the "technically incorrect" setting of nonlinear, RGB. IIRC, some SMPTE publications have used similar set of coefficients, that were not "technically matched", to the primaries, but perhaps they used for either historical reasons, or they resulted in visually pleasing images.