Water use efficiency - a research triumph?

Recent (May 2015) publicity from AEGIC - the Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre claims  farmers have doubled water use efficiency (WUE) over a thirty year period -

http://www.grdc.com.au/Media-Centre/Ground-Cover/Ground-Cover-Issue-116-May-June-2015/WUE-data-measures-an-industry-triumph


and this is considered a "triumph".
But the "glass half empty" view is that the graph in the report shows that WUE has stalled since about 1995, though it did improve from 1980. This plateau is now recognised at least by farm economists. 
Even more alarming should be the a likely delay between an idea for innovation to improve productivity, and implementation.
A positive should be that consulting agronomists now number some 2,300 across Australia, according to Mick Keogh and the Australian Farm Institute. This effort should be assisted by digital communications that we now have and that could not have imagined three decades ago. 
Yet despite these positives, the plateau in productivity improvement remains. A good start to fixing a problem like this would to confront it, with the right interpretation.