The stuff about going after patents isn't true in my experience: I can't think of a single prominent CS academic researcher in systems/PL who spends a lot of ti

The stuff about going after patents isn't true in my experience: I can't think of a single prominent CS academic researcher in systems/PL who spends a lot of time going after patents (... unless they do a startup company, of course). But otherwise, sure -- academics aren't incentivized to produce usable, non-prototype software. Sometimes they do anyway, but they aren't really rewarded for it professionally (with a few exceptions: e.g. Chord). That is especially true of something like Cyclone, which would require pretty considerable effort to support. The hope is that by writing papers that clearly describe a new idea, practitioners can make use of ideas developed by researchers (e.g. Cassandra is heavily influenced by the Dynamo paper). That's not always true, but forcing academics to write production-quality software and then provide support for it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense either.