Once someone like e.g. Saul Griffith came up with the idea of Kinematic Replication [1], others could easily replicate it (or at least anyone with a laser cutter at that time). Same goes for my projects. [1.25] For goodness sake, the source code and build instructions are published so that people can replicate it. These ideas are not like Caleb Harper's claims of high productivity versions of existing processes. They're fresh formulations of concepts one might not ordinarily have had the notion and resources to combine. Just look at Hiroshi Ishii's work! [1.5] That stuff is not hard to do once you've seen it done once- but try to be the originator of some of that stuff. That's where the magic is!
Take a look at my pal Brian Whitman's work [2] which was the basis of Echo Nest and eventually Spotify's recommendation engines. These algorithms are published at conferences and in journals so anyone can go in and replicate them. Brian's work isn't remarkable because it's so unbelievable it can hardly be true - it's remarkable because it dares to combine machine learning with signal processing and social media. These were all new ideas at the time and and it was up in the air whether they could work. Now they're the bread and butter of many peoples' commercial and personal activities. Anyone saying these demos are rigged is revealing their own shallowing understanding of what takes place there.
I don't know much about how the culture of the lab changed after I left and Ito became the directory almost immediately after... I do know while I was there, it was actually a bit scrappy. The original "shop" in 2004 was...a 10x20 room with a single laser cutter, single waterjet cutter, a drill press, a Bridgeport-like mill and a CNC lathe. There were tools hanging over a tattered wooden workbench. When the second building was constructed around 2008(?), shop size expanded about 10x. It went from a four floor building to 6 story building with maybe 8x the space. Ito was a kind of cult figure. I felt out of the loop bc ppl talked about him like an angel but couldn't explain to me what he'd done.
[1] https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~saul/PhD/index.html
[1.25] https://web.archive.org/web/20100627183050/http://web.media....
We have a lot of shiny new half empty buildings in all the colleges, and a lot of very well paid "administrators" trying to get their name on some project. Tuition and fundraising demands are skyrocketing decade after decade and there is very little to show in real benefits for students or researchers.