Academia only worries about getting results for publishing. Testability, maintainability, clean design, all take a back seat because once the paper is done the author will likely never touch the code again.
I'm just a student doing research, trying to use their code. I don't even want them to fix the code, I just wanted to ask the primary sources about how they implemented a few things. I don't have to ask them, I could go to someone else or a forum and ask the same thing. Maybe I'm naive, but it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to just respond back and tell me that they don't have time.