You hit the nail on the head with my previous experience as well. Being on the implementation side of things, my team was constantly suspicious of design ideas

You hit the nail on the head with my previous experience as well. Being on the implementation side of things, my team was constantly suspicious of design ideas or mandates that had been developed by the R&D team. It was always the same litany of excuses. Something like their model doesn't reflect our implementation's reality (which would be a great problem to point out and fix if true...). In the end, it always felt like our engineers were the jocks to the R&D team's nerds, and nothing the R&D team did would be respected because they weren't building the "real" thing.