The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
I can confirm that in my current area of interest (how to synthesize a cello or saxophone sound), there are hundreds of academic papers published over decades, each of them says "our method sounds more realistic than others", but code and audio samples are never available, and verbal descriptions always skip crucial details. I have no doubt that academics have a ton of expertise, but their output in paper form is basically unusable, I'm not sure it achieves any purpose besides resume padding. Reading a forum of synth hobbyists is a hundred times more useful.