sounds like making the evidence fit the result
Q: How can we spin this so that it seems like these birds are attracted to intelligent males?
A: find out what the most successful males do better and call that intelligence.
Whereas in fact, the females are simply being turned off by "naff" red objects in the males' bowers. This sounds to me like taste / fashion / fadishness, rather than anything deeper. If that's so, then it sounds like Aussie birds are being turned on or off by the same traits that turn on (or off) other birds of all nationalities and species: namely they are attracted to males who show some amount of style, or even (perish the thought) fashion-sense.
There is one telling phrase in the report:
The best problem-solvers scored the most copulations,
Again, when the problem is "how do I score the most copulations?" this would seem to mark a success. However if the problem was "how do I get the high score in my video game?" then those birds probably wouldn't get it off very often - but might have equally satisfactory lives, based on their own measures of success. provided you don't mind the high-scorers forming a dead line in the evolutionary tree.
Maybe that was the dinosaurs' problem: great at gaming, crap at procreating.