academia is extremely prototype oriented so it might even be worse than industry in this regard, fyi.
I have some experience in academia and I mostly see the extremes: either blatant wholesale copy/paste as much as possible, or an extreme "not invented here" attitude, refusal to use existing solutions, a sentiment that everyone else's code is useless crap, and a lot of reinvented wheels.
No one knows everything. Not even close. If that is what you are looking for, some Godlike mastery of the esoteric, you are in the wrong field.
If you are willing to be resourceful which means dealing with the inherently messy business of solving Real Problems blinds and dead ends the occasional short cut and all, well, welcome! This is chaotic, but we love it!
Writing beautiful code is important mostly because, in the long run, it saves time and effort. But the perfect is often the enemy of the good. All of the beautiful code in the world is worth nothing if it doesn't solve somebody's problem and, usually, sooner is far better than later. If that bothers you, there is always academia.
What separates the masters from the cut-and-paste programmers churning out garbage is knowing when it is ok to take shortcuts and when it pays to take due care.