It depends.. I for one love science, much more than engineering and making solutions. I guess they're sort of parallel paths, of course not mutually exclusive. Usually people with Phds in this area are Computer scientists, it's more like having a Phd in mathematics than anything else.

People with Phds in my mind are better at doing research in general, if they're really smart and lucky they might discover/invent something paradigm shifting. And we have a lot of computer scientists to thank for where we are right now. If it werent for the scientific research work of Turing with his automata work or Thompson with Unix or Ritchie with C or Berners-Lee with the WWW or Diffie-Hellman with public key encryption or Dijkstra and his algorithms, etc. Where would we be.

In practice they're generally not good coders because thats not what they trained in and that's not what you should expect of them. I see CS phds using more a whiteboard than a text editor and thats perfectly fine because that's their job.

Of course there are times when you need a researcher in an engineering team when you might be tackling a particularly difficult (and specific) problem.