Yeah, those greedy guys just want to (1) keep their (underpaid) jobs and (2) have a bit more money to increase pay for their (underpaid) students. :) As with software engineers, and every other job, some academics are crappy and some are amazing. Let's not paint everybody with the same brush. As for incremental, well, the AI you're all so fond of was incremental academic research for a couple decades before it was this sudden world changing thing.