[mindcrime]

I reject the entire premise of your question. Nobody is "robbing" anything of anything. "Academia" isn't entitled to any specific individual's energy, passion, time, etc., and a PhD isn't "wasted" because the holder goes into industry. Individuals can, and will, make choices about how best to accomplish their goals, and if some of those individuals make choices that go against your idea of how things "ought" to be, then too bad.

The real world isn't a place where we get to be prescriptive in terms of dictating what other people focus on. This isn't Plato's world, where occupations are chosen for us at birth, with no opportunity for deviation. Here sovereign individuals make their own choices and the outcomes are an emergent property of the interactions of those billions of individuals.

All of that said, I also posit that it is possible (in some fields, albeit not all) to do original research outside the halls of "The Academy", with or without a PhD, both in industry or as an independent researcher who isn't affiliated with industry or academia.