2nd edition. I was one of the fools who didn't go start a startup in Palo Alto when money was raining heavier than tulips in 17th c. Holland.

I think you're waxing rosy retrospection that might be overly-generous. The OSI model turned out to be an overly-complicated, academic mirage and not a great fit to describe reality that wasn't useful L4+. SDN is mostly just network virtualization / tunneling by encapsulation, which has been rediscovered over and over again since the telegraph, with the exception network gear became more programmatically flexible with the control plane / data plane concepts. With added expense, it's nice to have physically-separated management &| control plane networks from the data plane for security, backup connectivity, and DDoS out-of-band resilience.

Even then, I think the academic networking curriculum missed opportunities to be practical and relevant with general basic network administration principles and high-performance interfacing approaches, such as offloading types, DMA, and zero copy.

C'est la vie. There's EE/CS academia, which does teach general principles and hard fundamental well, but falls short of being practical. It seems like the pragmatic-experimentation side could be improved without sacrificing rigorous theoretical foundations. Because what's the (@!$&% practical point of implementing MICMAC in 44 microinstructions with Huffman-encoded macroinstructions and gradual decoding minimized for microinstructions and for microcycles? Competitive hazing ritual abuse recounting. "Oh yeah, I had to code upside-down, blindfolded, in the snow with only 4 keys made of ivory and we had to hunt the elephants ourselves!"