Justification for feedback control

If a PhD candidate in control theory is asked, 'in what applications should feedback be applied?', he will typically struggle to deliver a learned response. This usually is not a consequence of a lack of rigorous training in control theory. More often than not, it is the result of weaknesses in the training process itself. The academy has over the last few decades increasingly distanced itself from control applications in favor of strictly theoretical development. The result is a population of PhDs in control who is expert in elegant (if not always applicable) mathematics and crashingly ignorant in the engineering of control design. This has opened an ever widening rift between the academic and industrial control communities. The former largely disregards the latter as primitive; the latter disregards the former as purveyors of the useless.