What made you go back into academia? Based on this snapshot of your life, it felt like academia at its best gave you an outlet to explore the things you were really interested in, but at its worst, had a ton of obvious drawbacks. Even in this book, it seems a lot of the best experiences stemmed from or started outside of the program (MSR) and the Ph.D, while providing support and enabling these things to happen in the first place, was no longer an active contributor in.
I know you had mentioned you could write a whole book on this, so I'm sure there's a lot to the story.
you've inadvertently answered the question for me, to a first approximation :) i think that academia is a great launching point for a wide array of scholarly activities that the free market (i.e., industry) doesn't directly pay for: research, public policy, outreach, teaching, mentoring, industry collaborations, etc. i can work with whatever companies i want (even ones that are actively competing with each other at the moment!) and be seen as a "neutral" party; i can share knowledge via teaching and research again with a "neutral" voice without being seen as a spokesperson for a particular company or other special interest group. you're right, though -- there's a whole lot to the story. maybe someday i'll write something up!
I know you had mentioned you could write a whole book on this, so I'm sure there's a lot to the story.