Researchers need to go wild and sometimes far off-the-rails to increase the odds of coming up with something that is both new, and potentially
popular enough, if they want the option to attract marketers who can only thrive on mass-consumption.
With luck, one out of 100 inventions will show promise on those points.
There's always a lifetime wake where the overwhelming vast majority of the work remains undeployed no matter what. The more undeployed milestones and inventions that some scientists have under their belt, the more accomplished they often are whether anybody knows it or not.
OTOH, equally active engineers more often need to have most of their time engaged in actual deployment of some kind or another, otherwise not as much progress will be able to reach as many people that could benefit. So many times nothing would be accomplished without a long-term focused engineering effort once an objective has been identified. But it can be hard to stop a train when it's already coming off the drawing board at full steam.
It does seem a lot more likely for a judicious researcher to cast off some major progress in what could very well turn out to be an unsavory development, such as likely misuse, even if it could be marketed as the most popular thing they have so far. Just add it to the pile of other things that best remain undeployed. There's plenty more where that came from, and the best is yet to come.
Perhaps popularity alone is not always the best measure of progress.