It's crazy to me that researchers prefer to be published over having world renowned software to their name. You could figure out the fanciest database research, but there was a period where every fancy new NoSQL database was based on BerkeleyDB despite all that, bolstering the reputation of the University of Berkeley.
Despite all the research into garbage collectors nearly every new programming language I've seen uses either BoehmGC (from 1994) or simply gives up on the idea and uses reference counting.
Imagine if university groups would band together to produce really state of the art production quality reference software. They could use them as base for their research, bolster their reputation by having them be great, and even draw funding from big companies looking to hire the PhD's produced by the efforts.
Instead we have got all these half finished demonstration software that no one industry would touch with a ten foot pole.
It took just a few people to develop the first versions of rust, a research based programming language that in my opinion has been the biggest shock to the industry in decades (if you disregard machine learning).