> Until the "industry" values hardware

industries don't value things, markets value things. RTL work doesn't pay well because the products don't sell into markets that scale like software. with the exception of NVIDIA and whatever you call Apple's teams that actually do/tweak hardware, no hardware product has the margins and scale of software. that's not culture, that's physics.

> who know plenty about compiler theory and/or have contributed significantly to it

also maybe some RTL people know about compiler stuff (phi nodes/dataflow analysis/reg alloc/etc) but most definitely do not know anything except verilog/vhdl and perl/python.