A well-written and fascinating article, and I think your conclusions are (sadly) correct. Personally, I think this simply means I was born in the wrong era. I'd rather run my novels through a "Dickens app" to add vivid description, clever sentence structure, and wit. Or how about a "Tolkien app" that adds loads of extra description of forests and landscape, invented languages, and poetry?

I'm joking of course - I do understand the need to engage readers immediately in our media-saturated culture, and my novels are written with that in mind.