As other people have mentioned - the problem is that academia rewards producing papers, not stable software libraries.
For example - scikit-learn is an amazing project, lead mostly by a small group at INRIA with Gael at the helm - and in terms of academic prestige, scikit-learn is probably 'worth less' on your CV than a couple of Nature papers.
This is of course ridiculous - scikit learn is used by a huge amount of people, it takes an insane amount of work to run the project, yet the incentives are what they are.
For example - scikit-learn is an amazing project, lead mostly by a small group at INRIA with Gael at the helm - and in terms of academic prestige, scikit-learn is probably 'worth less' on your CV than a couple of Nature papers.
This is of course ridiculous - scikit learn is used by a huge amount of people, it takes an insane amount of work to run the project, yet the incentives are what they are.