I feel like these are extremely different things being compared.

For a lot of technology, most really, the best way to study how to improve it is to make the best thing you know how to and then work on trying to make it better. That's what's been done with all the current quantum computing attempts. Pretty much all of the industry labs with general purpose quantum computers can in fact run programs on them, they just haven't reached the point where they're running programs that are useful beyond proving out and testing the system.