You need both people with their heads in the clouds dreaming of fantasy futures as you also need those promoting the status quo. The former gives us direction and hope (motivation) while the latter gives us stability. There is a balance. To use reinforcement learning terms: exploration and exploitation. In reality there are many more subsets that each pull in different directions. I agree that this is optimization and most of them play essential roles. But it also means we should adjust the weights and pay attention when one starts to dominate and throw things out of balance. And I'd argue that this is exactly what has happened in academia. The bureaucrats won and threw things out of balance. I'm not asking to go somewhere we've never been before, but I think many have because they don't know what the past looked like.