Hmmm, I do remember my first Infovis Conference panel as a research student. Unfortunately, the experience was quite similar to yours. The topic was about the state of the visualization field, and why none of the discoveries in the field were applied in commercial or publicly available applications. Anyway, I haven't found an academic community that is so self-critical, to the extent of self-destructive. I am still trying to get used to it :)...

(Did not like the requirement to sign up for this blog, by the way)