> Or maybe I'm wrong and society is lacking that final breakthrough deconstruction of Proust before we all happily move forward toward enlightenment.

We already do have a group of people in our society who believe something similar: priests. They've survived quite a long while as a group without needing to be paid for any actions that directly benefit the people paying them; churchgoers just keep them alive and fed through donations, from a moral sense of obligation to the church itself.

Perhaps, then, the readers of quality English literature need to form a religion (or, at least, a cult) around it, and pay tithes to the professors? Heck, that could probably also pay to get the literature itself written in a much more sensible way than publishing houses manage... ;)

Or are you maybe actually getting paid for your programming language work in the form of useful contacts, better reputation, better experience, and so on which increase your salary?

I'd place money on the later -- so you don't do it for free, you just don't do it for direct money. I doubt you would write programming languages nearly as intensely if you were the aforementioned negotiator. The reward would be less and you would instead be going for drinks with clients and otherwise networking, it is a hobby people like that also ends up in professional payout...