Is There a Commonality in Research?

I feel like there is a commonality across many research projects that I was involved in in the Conswitch and maybe in general in research world, which is if you could do it just in an app, you would try that. But the whole thing that makes a research is really this is something that should probably be operating system level or just cuts across the text stacks of our computers. And hence, the only way to try them and see if they're plausible or good ideas in practice or how they feel to use is to do them in this research context where you kind of have to hand wave.