right, but anything linearly reducable to kSAT is trivially sub-exponential, and a discovery like this means that linear reductions are a whole lot more important than they used to be.

Also for NP problems that can't linear reduce to kSAT just having the knowledge that SAT is sub-exponential (and the tools), makes it a lot more likely that we see a whole lot more problems become exponential.

Yeah that would be interesting, like could there be different NP languages being sub-exponential but for entirely different reasons.