There is a dream, among mathematics educators, for a common direction that would unite teachers, policy makers and researchers, with researchers collaborating to accumulate knowledge and thus contribute to the understanding and improvement of school practice. But this dream becomes less and less realistic in view of the tendency of mathematics education to multiply and diversify its epistemological foundations, theoretical approaches, methodologies and research questions. In response to concerns and challenges, mathematics educators started engaging in "meta-studies" such as attempts at outlining a definition of the domain, more or less comprehensive syntheses of research approaches and theories, comparison of theories, and analyses of articles published in leading journals and conference proceedings over the past 10 or more years. The author decided to take a more empirical approach and have a good look at a more or less "random sample" of papers, in the sense that they were not specially selected to represent this or that issue, theme, theoretical perspective or mathematical topic. In reading the reports, the author had several questions in mind. In this article, the author will initially give an overview of the results from this empirical study, and then elaborate a little more on one particular issue (namely, task problematization). She will give examples of task problematization from the 55 PME papers, but she shall also go beyond the sample and speak more broadly on various approaches to this kind of work, known to her from other publications.