[a_bonobo]

As another ex-academic: maintenance is even bad for your career!

You're being evaluated based on how many papers you can publish, so the academic process selects for good (well, fast...) writers, not good coders. Papers are selected for novelty, so it's much easier to publish a paper based on a 'novel' algorithm than to publish a paper based on v2.0 of the algorithm. There might be novelty in the v2.0, but it's risky, reviewers and editors might not agree. There's always novelty in the v1.0 (well, it's academia, so it's more v0.1)

[_jyty]

As someone who isn't in academia, I've heard of this being a problem before, but in the context of research related to computer science, it seems like private research at companies like Microsoft might be better for such research. A lot of interesting research comes from Microsoft, and I don't think they have a problem of over-incentivizing the speed of research publication. That said, I'm not in academia (and have never done research) nor employed by Microsoft; I'm an undergraduate in computer science. Just speculating. Do you think this could be plausible, or is it way off?