Dynamic Progamming: First Principles 9 years ago
In O.R. graduate School, Professor Gene Woolsey told us that he'd rise from the grave and stand on our desks screaming 'No!No!No!' if we ever actually used it to solve a practical problem.
IIRC, his complaints were about the speed of formulation, difficulty to understand and communicate the model to others, and the processing required to regenerate answers when the model changed.
I believe Optiant used Dynamic Programming for supply chain optimization.. So people do or did use it for practical problem solving. ..I think.