> You can pose and answer questions that make sense within in the system.

Yes this is one of my critiques of the academic system (I have finished a PhD and will hopefully never work at a university ever again). Many papers in the introduction start with explaining how the study builds on plenty of previous research, but that alone doesn’t prove that something is a good direction to investigate. If academics were completely honest, many papers would write “We researched topic X because we got funding for it. But since we actually don’t care about X, we just wrote a proposal about our favorite niche topic that only one of the co-authors cares about, namely topic Y, and wrote it such that it sounds like X. Next we show that Y is actually very cool in the hope to convince others that it is cool plus to convince others of the conclusion that our most senior professor already found during the PhD which was 30 years ago. Apart from the professor, we don’t believe in the main argument of the paper but since he got the grant we’ll just go with it in the hope to one day be able to push our own ideas forward”.