Are vim and Emacs not real applications? How about gimp? Firefox? Thunderbird?
The gnome people could have used an Emacs or vim window instead of gEdit. But they didn't, because more or less the same incentives that prevent commercial entities from developing components instead of apps exist in the open source community as well.
Hell, even GCC is essentialy an app, even though parts of it would have been extremely useful as share-able components, as clang showed.
And I really don't know what researchers produce apps. The closest I can think of is maybe Coq?
The gnome people could have used an Emacs or vim window instead of gEdit. But they didn't, because more or less the same incentives that prevent commercial entities from developing components instead of apps exist in the open source community as well.
Hell, even GCC is essentialy an app, even though parts of it would have been extremely useful as share-able components, as clang showed.
And I really don't know what researchers produce apps. The closest I can think of is maybe Coq?