Interesting analogy with pottery. I see that an important academic practice that does scale like vases is structuring your research in easily publishable way. A

Interesting analogy with pottery. I see that an important academic practice that does scale like vases is structuring your research in easily publishable way. As a beginner (typically a young highly motivated idealistic student — who else would want to go to academia in the first place?), you can start with good research idea and important results and no understanding of academic world, but struggle to get accepted anywhere decent because you didn't follow all unwritten rules, and as you get experience, you learn the rules of the game and plan your work to contain many low-risk "least publishable units" to build your reputation. So yes, "a lot of unimportant papers". Many interesting papers nowadays come from commercial R&D departments, like MS Research, because unimportant papers probably don't move your main KPIs (which would be "a lot of patents" AFAIU), and only interesting results improve the image of the company and serve as good marketing material.