Why is it in the best interests of those developers to persue an academic degree rather than real world experience, setting aside the rather hefty financial reasons for a moment? That seems to be the underpinning question here...
Definitely. I think you are hitting on the same point that majos did. The best answer I have is the reason I did a PhD: freedom. It gave me many hours of unstructured time to explore problems I was interested in, which I would not have been able to do while working full time (I tried).