Comment by freedomben

I'm extremely pro-academic, but I think you're taking the least charitable interpretation of the parent. While I fully disagree with the parent on the value proposition here, they are quite correct that (at least most) phds aren't concerned with implementation problems like corner cases and long term maintenance. There are of course exceptions, but having worked on quite a bit of academic code, I can say that anecdatally maintainability is not a high priority. It's very much like a typical PoC is in a startup.