  The last decade has witnessed many visual analytics (VA) systems that make
successful applications to wide-ranging domains like urban analytics and
explainable AI. However, their research rigor and contributions have been
extensively challenged within the visualization community. We come in defence
of VA systems by contributing two interview studies for gathering critics and
responses to those criticisms. First, we interview 24 researchers to collect
criticisms the review comments on their VA work. Through an iterative coding
and refinement process, the interview feedback is summarized into a list of 36
common criticisms. Second, we interview 17 researchers to validate our list and
collect their responses, thereby discussing implications for defending and
improving the scientific values and rigor of VA systems. We highlight that the
presented knowledge is deep, extensive, but also imperfect, provocative, and
controversial, and thus recommend reading with an inclusive and critical eye.
We hope our work can provide thoughts and foundations for conducting VA
research and spark discussions to promote the research field forward more
rigorously and vibrantly.
