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One of the reasons I left academia was that, as an Engineer I became completely disillusioned with the novelty over utility bias. Things were published because they were new and not because they were really any better than existing techniques.

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I completely disagree with your sentiment and think that academia should focus on novel work rather than incremental improvements. Something novel may not be better than the existing techniques right now, but what's to say they won't be better in the future? When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, it was not better than candles because it was extremely expensive, fragile, lasted only briefly, and the light was very dim. But it was novel and with more improvements, beat the state-of-the-art.

Science requires repeatability and thorough testing to stabilize theories. If studies are only preformed once and discarded, instead of repeated, we know nothing.

You can't disagree with my reasons for leaving academia. I never said academia was at fault, simply that I wanted to build useful things and couldn't achieve that when I was only going to be measured largely on how novel the solution was.

I would also suggest that most valuable research conducted today is incremental. Even the amazing breakthroughs are usually the final piece of many years of work by many varied teams.

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