Of course, there's tons of academic research that does all of those things. And I of course agree that too much academic software is "works on my grad students

Of course, there's tons of academic research that does all of those things. And I of course agree that too much academic software is "works on my grad students machine"--an enormous amount of my time on Racket is spent on real-world works-in-practice issues. But this doesn't seem like it's a particular issue of industry-relevant systems work, just Sturgeon's Law. Also, failure to address the general case is not so bad--it just means that the next part of the general case has to be addressed by the next researcher. Finally, I think the real issue is academics who have an idea, and cloak it in pseudo-relevance to industry to sell it. A program analysis framework isn't suddenly industry-relevant now that it applied to JavaScript, and we should just be ok with not chasing the latest industry fad.