Did you mean academic field?

Yes, my bad.

You mean professional phi. bad, amateur phil good.

A good professional study of philosophy itself is to me indistinguishable from someone doing metaresearch, i.e. figuring out how to make the standards of the scientific method even better and the techniques of all scientists more efficient. IME, this is not what the majority of academics working in Philosophy Departments are doing.

OTOH, good applied philosophy, i.e. the sort of stuff you do once you've studied the result of the above metaresearch, is basically just doing science. In other words, doing research in any field that is not about how to do research.

So yes, in a sense, most academics categorized as "professional phil" are less good than most academics categorized as "amateur phil" who mainly work in other disciplines. The latter are also almost exclusively "sciencey-philly cross-disciplinary".

I'm guessing we both agree that non-academic-nor-scientist amateur philosophers are less likely to produce meaningful research than any of the above, and yet is pretty much the stereotype that most people (in the general north-american population) assign to "philosophers". Then again, the exclusion of "scientists" from that category feels like begging the question.