This is hardly the only place in society where X is desperately needed, but people don't want to pay for it, and continue to suffer through the underprovision of X.

Here, software engineering is simply not viewed as prestigious or important, or often, even as valuable. The science is viewed as valuable. A lack of bugs or rigorous software engineering practices... nobody cares.

Some of it is a phd is a prestige competition, and dirty engineers being comped on par with people who spent (cough wasted cough) a decade or more of their life in college/post-docs just won't do.

And a piece of it is the scale of the investment needed. Imagine a couple million LOCs with only manual testing. Your two weeks of writing tests is a tiny drop in the bucket. Retrofitting reasonable software dev standards on these projects is enormously expensive.

Finally, there's an inescapable volume issue. Suppose I build a hot new confocal microscope and I sell 300 of them for low hundreds of thousands each. I have 2 teams of devs ($2M/year/team) for 2 years on analysis code, for a $8m investment. That's $27k/machine. That's real tough math to make work. Whereas Google pays gmail engineers really well, in part because they spread those costs over a billion users.