You're a right, it isn't completely thankless. And it was suggested to me as a great way to increase citations was to write my algorithm to work in LAMMPs. Nevertheless, I looked at the risk-reward (and also considered the algorithm I was working on worthless and decided to punt).
Oh, I completely agree. The projects I saw were considered novel for actually getting funding for staff engineering positions which didn't follow the regular academic track. They had to do that to get the right people since the grad students were heavily incentivized to focus on things which would get noteworthy publications and you couldn't get experienced software engineers on the academic pay scale unless you hit the unicorn of someone who was really interested in the domain and didn't like money.
