It's not how academia is structured, but backing up criticism with a protoype of the alternative IMO completely solves the credability problem.
From the vantage of the social sciences, where one can only dream of running prototype towns and cities, this is a gift and systems researchers should consider themselves lucky.
What if there are many alternatives? Each implementation would be a challenge to optimize fairly. You’d be forced to have some open competition to make it convincing.
I'm confused what you mean? The prototypes need not be performant, they just must be correct and not outrageously naive to demonstrate the better abstractions/layering is working.
The questions are: is the code beautiful and dose it work?
From the vantage of the social sciences, where one can only dream of running prototype towns and cities, this is a gift and systems researchers should consider themselves lucky.