[Veuxdo]

You describe your workplace as academically-inspired, yet experimentation and large PRs are discouraged. In you shoes, I'd double-check to make sure the "small-PRs-only" policy is in alignment with the company values before making that a real point of contention.

[barking_biscuit]

The small PRs thing literally came out of things like "The Principles of Product Development Flow", which talks extensively about Queuing Theory, as well as the findings from Accelerate which came out of academic research. So... I can very much see how it would be aligned?