is there an understanding with the people involved with actual AI research that LW and MIRI are not worth bothering with?
As far as DeepMind goes, Jaan Tallinn was involved in it and is one of the biggest donors to MIRI.
If I look at the participant list of MIRI workshops they always had a person from Google in attendance.
Ben Goertzel has made available a pre-print copy of his book Engineering General Intelligence (Vol1, Vol2). The first volume is basically the OpenCog organization's roadmap to AGI, and the second volume a 700 page overview of the design.