> many postdocs that are both academically and software-engineering capable can easily convince themselves that this isn't the cold truth.

Thanks, this (and your other answers) is very useful. I'm about to finish my PhD, and have a recently open-sourced code I've written that's also a bit tangential to my PhD work (it's for molecular dynamics, "raaSAFT" on Bitbucket/PyPi). It may be easier for this type of code, though, in the sense that it's an application rather than a library, but I am aware that I may have to down-prioritize working on it in the short-term. (I'm not in CS either.)