The debate between loop quantum gravity and string theory is sometimes lively, and it is hard to present an impartial view on the issue. Leaving any attempt to impartiality aside, I report here, instead, a conversation on this issue, overheard in the cafeteria of a Major American University.
Metadata: arXiv. Abstracts retain their original authors’ rights.
In the conversation
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First, advice about arXiv.org links: for me, at least, it's nice to see a link to the main abstract page rather than directly to the full PDF. Here, that link would be http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0310077
And second, this isn't "When physicists chat over lunch". This is "A nine year old dialog by a loop quantum gravity specialist putting words into the mouth of an imaginary string theorist." That may or may not be worth reading, but I think the context is important. [The date "2008" on the final page is some sort of typo: the arXiv time stamp on the first page makes the submission date clear.]
I use this on several of my sites as well. None of them get any significant amount of traffic, so I figured it would be okay to add more names to the list, as a small token of keeping their memory alive.
Browsing the web with the Clacks Overhead extension for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clacks-overhead-gn...), I'm always surprised by which sites enable this extension. My latest find is arXiv.org! If you go to any abstract page, such as https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0310077v2 (picked that one at random for its humour), the header will be sent.
I know absolutely nothing about physics. But I still found this paper enjoyable to read, because it's written in the format of a discussion between fictional characters: https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0310077v2.pdf
I'm in string theory as well, most of my knowledge about LQG is mostly from other string theorists. From my experience, string theorists can be extremely hostile towards the ideas in LQG and the people involved in it. So I would not quite share your view.
Then from LQG there is for example this [0], which portrays string theorists as a bit naive and ignorant.
I know that LQG is not purely focused on quantum gravity, there are some papers out there that discuss how to combine Yang-Mills theories to LQG, and it is suppose to be "easy" (see discussion around page 15 of [0] for example). But, as you might mean when you say that they are purely focused on QG, is that it is (or seems to be (to my very limited understanding of LQG)) to some degree considered a solved problem.
[0]
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0310077
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will.