That's problem #1 in the current format of humanities graduate education. The assistantships train students to teach classes and grade papers, and the research

That's problem #1 in the current format of humanities graduate education. The assistantships train students to teach classes and grade papers, and the research and dissertation process teach students how to get an academic paper published. It's optimized for generating new professors (tenure-track or otherwise), and there's not much demand to tailor it in other directions since the dream career of most humanities grad students is being a tenured professor. This is less of a problem in subject areas where entering students already have a different career in mind, e.g. engineering. I won't speculate what those alternative careers could be, but in other improbable fields that attempt to reassert their relevance, applied career paths have a tendency to pop out and eventually be reincorporated into academia as a new, related discipline. For example, psychology has already forked and merged a few times.