Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.
A part of this is that consumers usually don't have very good information about products like that. I would almost always pay twice as much for an appliance that's going to last three times as long, but I usually can't find a review that's based on a teardown and rebuild or testing to destruction.
Aircraft engines are subjected to both.
Some of this seems reverse causal to me. There were many consumers interested in options other than a race to the bottom. I certainly remember 90s Consumer Reports-era consciousness of consumers trying to find the best products as they all seemed to race to the bottom.
The irony seems to be that now that GE has sold GE Appliances they've been returning to higher quality and cutting fewer corners just because activist US shareholders wanted slightly higher dividends each quarter. It feels like only a matter of time before Heier finishes the next steps in the Lenovo playbook and stops paying GE to license their brand and stop giving credit to a US company that stopped caring about consumers and consumer product quality decades ago.
Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them.
Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit for universities.