Almost no other engineering discipline is volatile like that. So why should SE be? There are trends and fashions, of course, and missteps along the way, but the success of building a bridge has nothing to do with time to market. (The success of selling a bridge still might!) Sure, many engineering fields are similarly at the mercy of erratic consumer or business interests, but the fundamentals of what makes a good fridge or camera or building aren’t decided by the marketing department or some yelling contest on the internet where the winner is who has the most Github stars. Real engineering absolutely progresses in universities hand in hand with the real world, or do you think that institutions like the MIT or Caltech or Cambridge’s School of Technology don’t have anything to do with the success of engineering endeavors everywhere?