I may be misunderstanding your comment, but as I understood it you are talking about industry failures academia can't do anything about. If industry is massively behind on outdated, closed environments and academia work's with different, open tools then that's not academias fault. Like:

> it's legacy product support and ease of onboarding new hires.

I don't see how academia can help with this, this so very much an industry problem.

> But I need these to be accessible by Billy Joe, whose only credentials that got him the job in the maintenance department is that he helped out his daddy working with a welder and an old clapped-out Bridgeport on the farm growing up.

While accessible interfaces and forms of human-computer interactions are researched by academia, they are not building products. Research has to be relevant, but it's still research. Those problems, they might be better addressed by a startup than academia, if that's even realistic. Academia can't solve a problem if it's not a research-problem.