You and samth seem to be missing the point: academic research is often built using methods that will ensure no real-world success while aiming to achieve real-world success. Factoring in real-world constraints, best practices, and existing work-arounds will let academics achieve better results on average. Baseline of practicality goes up.<p>And again, these are all academic projects that aim at being practical. The point is supported by a number of academics that incorporate real-world information and constraints into their work to produce deliverables that advance state-of-the-art <i>and are useful</i>. Examples that come to mind are: Haskell&#x2F;Ocaml&#x2F;Racket languages, CompCert C compiler, Microsoft&#x27;s SLAM for drivers, SWIFT auto-partitioning for web apps, Sector&#x2F;Sphere filesystem, the old SASD storage project (principles became EMC), old Beowulf clusters, ABC HW synthesis, RISC-V work, and so on. So many examples of academics keeping their head in the real-world instead of the clouds to making a name for themselves with awesome stuff with immediate and long-lasting benefits. I&#x27;m not Matt but I&#x27;m guessing he&#x27;d rather see more examples like this than, say, a TCP&#x2F;IP improvement that breaks compatibility with all existing Tier 1-3 stacks and whose goal is to improve overall Web experience. Yes, there are people working on those. ;)