The most practical use of BCFW that I have found is in arxiv:1010.3991; if you read pages 3 and 4 closely, you’ll see that BCFW was used to construct N=4 amplitudes which were then transposed to QCD and used to calculate a “W + 4 jets” background. I take your point that, although there are theorists using BCFW to model LHC physics, including some from BlackHat, the LHC teams themselves still do their in-house calculations using other methods. Though I think of unitarity cuts as another part of the same big transformation as BCFW.
The most practical use of BCFW that I have found is in arxiv:1010.3991; if you read pages 3 and 4 closely, you’ll see that BCFW was used to construct N=4 amplitudes which were then transposed to QCD and used to calculate a “W + 4 jets” background. I take your point that, although there are theorists using BCFW to model LHC physics, including some from BlackHat, the LHC teams themselves still do their in-house calculations using other methods. Though I think of unitarity cuts as another part of the same big transformation as BCFW.