A collaboration between the US Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy. Lots of solid engineering out of Oak Ridge, Argonne, Sandia Labs. Make it a system owned and operated by the FAA.
Researchers and academics are quite possibly the last people on earth I would ask to deliver safety-critical software.
Flight codes -- and making sure they don't break systems -- is a software engineering problem.
Different skillsets. I know folks who work at national labs. They have neither the skillset nor the interest to do this kind of work. (I am a researcher)
It's the monumental effort of coordination across many, many entities running legacy software and doing so in a way that doesn't take down critical infrastructure in the process.
It's very, very difficult but in a completely different way to building weather modeling systems.