Granted, I'm an academia washout, but this sounds like as much a problem with the systems of tenure and publishing as it does the perfectionist researchers.
The underlying story tells a tale of a "groundbreaking" book circulated like academic samizdat among scholars in the field, cited 100's of times. This meets any reasonable scholarly threshold, IMO. Why should tenure require the imprimatur of a publisher? chronicle.com/article/An-Und…
The problem of tenure publishing is further exacerbated by the fact that if he'd published his "imperfect" book, his desire to revise and refine would've been disincentivized by a system which requires something "new" even though both paths would produce fresh knowledge.
