Fair enough. But, speaking as a researcher, I often find myself reading through hundreds of lines of code and rebuilding routines from scratch in order to repro

Fair enough. But, speaking as a researcher, I often find myself reading through hundreds of lines of code and rebuilding routines from scratch in order to reproduce and expand on what others did in their works. However, I was very harsh, and of course I wouldn't find viable to expect production ready code, but something moderately portable could come handy. Of course, as you said, a researcher doesn't have the time to build a well developed library. As a solution, my University is considering the idea of hiring a dedicated developer whose job would be to maintain libraries. I really hope this to happen.