I disagree here. Even if the authors themselves do not specifically address it, the data certainly do.
This also crops up in other areas - you will not find a paper where the authors specifically address the idea that the earth is 6,000 years old, for example. Why not? Because the evidence we have doesn’t even come close to 6KYA. The data absolutely are relevant to the question.
Or to put it another way, I don’t think we need more work - I think the literature is clear. I suppose what would be most convincing to you would be to have the 1000 genomes group, or Li and Durban, etc, run a simulation to see what their PSMC results would look like on an artificial dataset that is instantaneously reduced to 2 people. I think you’d see a result that gets down at least close to Ne=2 (or 20, or 200) even if it spread that result over a longer timescale, like we see in their papers. What you’re arguing is that ~1500 and 2 are indistinguishable by their methods. I disagree. More anon.