Academics answer questions that have been privileged in various ways: perhaps the questions their advisor was interested in, or the questions they'll most easily be able to publish papers on. Neither of these are necessarily well-correlated with the most important questions.

Important to whom? To the people who choose low-hanging research topics that promise easy tenure? Could easily be the most important questions for them.

The apocryphal Hamming-story only shows that people would like to conflate their own "most important" which takes into account their career trajectory with "most important in the field", and don't appreciate being told they compromised in favor of paying the bills.