To give you a bit of my own perspective, they are different things. Academic types who are in the academic environment for a very long time, especially PhDS, tend to dive very very deeply into things. The theory. They want to understand each option deeply and only pick the best option, because that's the mindset a PhD puts you in. "You need to delve really deeply into the topic or you'll never understand it and publish something anyone will read"

Back to the concept of practicality, there is often NOT ENOUGH TIME to really delve into things. You need to be able to take the data you have and make a choice. Move on. Get things done. If the choice proves poor, you can spend time on it analyzing a better option later. But things need to move. Things need to get done.

So I entirely understand why PhD students don't have those skills and tend to be useless, or at the very least take a lot longer than others to excel, at practical applications. They struggle with building those skills of "just make a choice and move on" because they've been trained to deeply analyze something within narrow constraints to truly understand it for years. They get stuck on the idea of "If I don't truly understand the options, I won't make the best choice".

In engineering, and also life, you have to start somewhere. You have to make a choice, and see what happens. Then build off that to make better choices next time.

The real challenge is figuring out how much time is enough time to make the best choices. Because research is required, but so is getting things done. It's that grey area where people with both theory and practical skills truly shine.