> It seems to me LL and LR parser generators are overrated, and hand-written recursive descent is best in practice

I would now agree with that. My compiler experience was on a team that happened to have a LALR expert, Jeanne Musinski PhD, a student of Jeffrey Ullman. She invented a better error recovery for the language. Recursive descent would have been perfectly suited to the task.

> LR being more expressive than LL has never mattered.

Quite agree. One might guess that a language that needs that might be hard to program in.