> practitioners would be interested in hearing from advances in academia, but usually don't want to read papers. Building fully working systems

Isn't that kind of the whole problem? Practitioners ignoring research results because all they want to look at is what other practitioners do? Or are you really suggesting that researchers also become practitioners who develop working systems based on the ideas they discover?

Perhaps I'm misreading, but your statement seems to encapsulate the entire problem the article is highlighting.