The linked survey comments on this; whenever we've been able to put a problem in P, we've almost always been to bring down the exponent to practical sizes.
The classic low hanging fruit problem. Whenever we've pumped an oil well dry, we've almost always found another easy to pump well, therefore all oil wells are easy to exploit and we'll never run out of oil. There are other analogies with the ease of catching wild passenger pigeons and bison.
