[jacobolus]

Indeed. It doesn't have to consistently work, be easy to modify, be efficient, be well documented, etc., and in general usually won't be since there is no reward for any of these. It just has to "prove a point" (read: provide sufficient support for the next published paper, with paper reviewers caring far more about the paper's text than any associated code or documentation).

Anyone who spends lots of time trying to make research-relevant code projects with solid architecture / a well designed API / tests / good documentation / etc. is doing it as a labor of love, with the extra work as volunteer effort. Very occasionally a particularly enlightened research group will devote grant money to directly funding this kind of work, but unfortunately academia by and large hasn't found a well organized way to support these (extremely valuable) contributions, and lots of these projects languish, or are never started, due to lack of support.

[tesdinger]

Universities are full of smart people, who know what works best for them. I doubt they would ignore extremely valuable work.

[jacobolus]

What's your point? In practice, people doing work on solid research infrastructure code don't get social or financial support, don't get tenure, often can't keep academic jobs, and typically end up giving up and switching to (highly paid and better respected) industry work. Sometimes that code ends up supported as someone's part-time hobby project. If you hunt around you can find this discussed repeatedly, sometimes bitterly. Some of the most important infrastructure projects end up abandoned, with no maintainers.

In practice, most research code (including supposedly reusable components) ends up getting written in a slipshod ad-hoc way by grad students with high turnover. It typically has poor choice of basic abstractions, poor documentation, limited testing, regressions from version to version, etc. Researchers make do with what they can, and mainly focus on their written (journal paper) output rather than the quality or project health of the code.