I don't disagree with any of that. "Important" and "tedious", sadly, are not mutually exclusive. (In fact, my guess would be that they're positively correlated, albeit not very strongly.)

In the case I refer to above, the talk in question was at Eastercon and was about the state of feminism in science fiction, which struck me as likely to be particularly poor in opportunities to actually achieve anything useful in the area :-)