Oh wait, we pay computing grad students literally 1/10 of their potential salary ($10Ks vs $100Ks). Why could there possibly be a shortage?
-_-
More importantly, it shouldn't be prohibitively expensive to port academic Python code.
The low pay is in exchange for the ability to do research, not to be a discount software engineer.
But graduate schooling is still a big opportunity cost, and not to go all Mark Twain, but sometimes that can get in the way of your education.
* Very low pay.
* Good benefits in a nation with poor safety nets.
* Tuition waivers along the lines of $10-100K/year.
* When the Dr. says jump, you ask how high.
If you view education as an investment, it isn't necessarily bad compared to an ordinary job. But it's kind of like a FAANG company; your experience depends on who you report to.
It should be no surprise that such a poorly engineered process produces awful results.
But seriously, you're right. Grad students do grunt work, that's how it goes. And if an academic Python2 library is widely-used, porting it is important grunt work.
Surely, no serious researcher would let an important tool rot, right?
What is important to the grad students is to produce research papers and to fulfill their mandatory obligations (teaching, project deliverables). And most grad students, even in CS, are not professional software developers anyway. Good luck convincing capable grad student candidates to join your group to do boring software maintenance for horrible pay and no job security.
What is important to the professors, who decide what the grad students will work on, is again to produce research papers, fulfill their mandatory obligations (teaching, project deliverables) and to continually file for grants. Spending grad student time on porting and maintaining libraries does not help with that. In the worst case your grad student is spending their time maintaining a tool that a competing group's grad students are using to churn out papers, beating you to publications and grants.
What is important for the funding agencies is flashy new research in the current hot topics. I never saw a funding agency that would even consider paying a grad student, let alone a full software engineer salary, to port an academic tool from Python2 to Python3 or do all the other maintenance you need to do on production codebases---nor do most universities even have salary classes and positions for that.
As a result, in the many years I spent in academia, I saw many important research tools rot (both software and large hardware testbeds). The solution is not grad students, but to have fully paid software engineer positions in academia. But realistically that is not going to happen.
Rot is a very big part of what happens to a lot of information.