Conlanging as a hobby has gotten some attention in media and popular culture recently, whatwith several television series and a few movies having commissioned languages, Paolini's conlanging exploits garnering some attention and so on. The number of people taking up or at least trying their hand at conlanging during a year probably grows from one year to the next, and is, I would bet, an order of magnitude larger now than in the early 2000s at the very least.
This is not particularly bad or problematic as such, but with this, some newcomers - and some oldbies as well - adopt some kind of weird attitude regarding the entire hobby. We have those who think this hobby deserves academic attention. Well, it does not deserve intentionally being ignored, exactly the same way no other hobby deserves being intentionally ignored- after all, research has been done on children's games, on even the least measurable aspects of music, on amateur literature, amateur theatre, on the sociological aspects of computer games, on fan fiction, on head-banging at metal and hardcore concerts, the sociology, mechanics and et cetera ad infinitum. Some conlangers do think conlanging has significance for the study of natural languages and linguistics, though, and that is probably a mistake appearing from lack of understanding of real linguistics.
Of course, there are some experimental uses for throwaway conlangs in linguistics - a pretty obvious example would be generating a small language to test whether some specific feature can be acquired or reliably replicated by the human brain or for testing sociolinguistic things (how do people react to people speaking with an accent or a language they cannot identify). However, this requires little actual conlanging experience (or godforbid, 'expertise'), it rather more requires the kind of knowledge linguists have acquired by reading linguistics journals and literature, from seminars and field research, from learning languages and about languages. Even if you've made fifty a priori languages and as many a posteriori ones that all are oh so beautiful or oh so clever, the linguistics-related skillset you've acquired, while probably impressive in sheer quantity, is not particularly academically relevant. (One minor exception - some a posteriori conlangers really have a good grip on historical linguistics of some family or families of languages, i.e. the authors of Novegradian or Dravean. However, both of these have proven their knowledge of the relevant fields in other ways than conlanging as well.)
There are an infinite number of things which attract the interest of small segments of academia - possibly even segments of only one or two scholars. There is only a finite number of people working in academia. Some topics, no matter how interesting to you or me, will not make the cut. To those who cannot accept this, there's only one way of putting it: stop being so self-centered already.
Academia already provides us with tons of useful material - descriptions of grammars of languages from all over the world (albeit usually at a fair cost), but also freely available papers on obscure features in obscure languages, comparative descriptions of features in all kinds of languages, etc. These are very useful resources, and academia provides a significant part of it free of charge. If you have access to a university library, you get even more as a bonus. Compared to the situation when I started conlanging in 1998 or thereabouts, the amount of free resources available online has grown by several orders of magnitude. Academia hands us more useful stuff than we could ever ask for. Is it really mature to show our appreciation by griping about not getting enough attention?
Some conlangers semi-regularly start discussions about 'closetedness' - as though having an unusual hobby was something as stressful as being gay in a religious family or being the only atheist in Alabama. Of course, conlanging is a hobby that is somewhat odd - it is probably among the odder hobbies - far from the oddest, but odd enough to raise some eyebrows. So is playing Classical Indonesian music, so is composing serialistic music, so is east European folk dances, so is basically studying anything that lacks utility. People usually don't get worried about what people are going to think about the fact that they compose serialistic music or play the gamelan or dance horas and polkas. Why do conlangers pretend conlanging is something so weird that they must worry about rejection etc over it? Get over yourselves - conlanging is no worse than writing science fiction or inventing board games.
Conlanging, of course, has little obvious utility. This is partially why some people want it to have academical respectability and attention - if it did we could pretend our hobby was actually genuinely useful. But compare to the things mentioned as comparable examples - all the actual utility those have is the enjoyment the hobbyists derive out of their hobby. Stop being such drama queens online.
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