[wonnage]

I think some of it might just be that CS theory sounds intimidating. But if you paid attention in college (which it sounds like you did), you might find that papers really aren't that hard to read. The hairy bit comes up when you don't know enough math, but this is typically more a problem if you're trying to learn something specialized (e.g cryptography).

Also, there's a disconnect between academia and the workforce. You might invent a fancy new data structure that blows up in real use because it ignores caches. Or you might invent something that's cache-aware, but everybody's using scripting languages or the JVM and doesn't have that level of access to the hardware. And so on. If you're strictly speaking about becoming better at the work of programming (rather than CS), that stuff isn't that important. You will spend way more time, especially as you move up in seniority, interacting with people - whether it's designing your system to be understandable by humans, persuading others of your ideas, getting funding, etc.