From what I saw (I worked in an academia-consulting partnership to solve scheduling problems in transports), the OR researchers very frequently work in associat

From what I saw (I worked in an academia-consulting partnership to solve scheduling problems in transports), the OR researchers very frequently work in association with OR consulting shops, and they're well-aware of the difference between academic datasets and industrial datasets. In the conferences I saw, it was not infrequent to see different tracks for industrial and academic papers, both attended by the same crowd. The point I agree with, though, is that this is not reflected in the papers. Academic papers focus on academic instances because they are more general (and usually harder, as you said) and because optimizations of specific instances of the problem are not that useful from an academic pov. It's hard to know who works with who and who has experience with what if you're not an insider, though.