I was in Rusty's lab for my PhD, and based all my computational work on those early neurogenesis papers. What's notable there is that while most of that work was anatomy and behavior; neurogenesis was a novel dynamic in the brain. So people at all research scales could run with it (no pun intended)

Of course, it is quite rare to find anything truly "new" in the brain - either experimental or theoretical. So when that happens it makes sense that the wake will be broad regardless of what type of work it was.