"(4) Academia: Where Originality Will Hurt You "The good, healthy mentality would naturally be to work on research that we believe is important. Unfortunately, most such research is challenging and difficult to publish, and the current publish-or-perish system makes it difficult to put bread on the table while working on problems that require at least ten years of labor before you can report even the most preliminary results. [...] "Ideally, the academic system would encourage those people who are already well established and trusted to pursue these challenges, and I’m sure that some already do. However, I cannot help but get the impression that the majority of us are avoiding the real issues and pursuing minor, easy problems that we know can be solved and published. The result is a gigantic literature full of marginal/repetitive contributions. This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing if it’s a good CV that you’re after."
I came away with the impression that there are a few people given extremely wide latitude to work (or not) on problems of real significance, who had generally been granted 'rock star' status by the math community in one way or another. It's a 1% whose academic freedoms serves as a motivation for the other 99%, who will try to write a bulk of irrelevant papers while dealing with a massive teaching load. A job in industry ultimately felt like it might provide more freedom in the long run than the academic track, with less danger of ending up in a adjunct teaching gig in Wichita.