Within the profession, academic prestige comes with publishing in the 'elite' journals and getting contracts from the 'elite' sources. Unfortunately, for the most part, publishing in those 'elite' journals has little to do with solving actual problems of actual people. This system goes so far as to purge those economists from the ranks of the well regarded who have the temerity to challenge the Economic Gods of efficiency and objectivity.
Thankfully, there are those practitioners who take the path less traveled - as Thoreau put it - by most academic economists and actually work in the area of pragmatic problem solving. They are scattered around the profession. While a student at Michigan State University, I encountered Warren Samuels, A. Allan Schmid, Harry Trebing, and James Schaffer who at the time were among the main flag bearers of Institutionalist Economics.
One thing that strikes me about 'mainstream' economists and economics overall is its desire to offer policy prescriptions and guidance while at the same time wanting to be seen as being objective. Ah, who doesn't want to have his/her cake and be able to eat it too? What I've worked to do is use tools from price theory, for example, and purge all the prescriptive stuff as much as possible. I worked setting electric rates for half the wholesale electricity used in the Pacific Northwest. Guidance like marginal cost pricing is useful AND how that's done etc. is a crucial part of the problem solving process. And, as you know, that part isn't of much interest to mainstream economics as it's practiced today. That, of course, is an understatement. The 'How' of policy work is derided as having nothing to do with economics. Rather, that's political science, sociology, psychology, history, and so forth. As Karl Marx quipped "History is economics in action." While in the 'real world' economics and politics are inseparable, in the fantasy world of the High Priests of the profession, there is absolutely NO room for such matters (and I include Gary Becker in that camp).
I like the structure-conduct-performance framework from Industrial Organization as a policy analysis framework, again purging as many of the 'shoulds' as possible from the economic principles. As I see it, there's no reasons to throw the baby out with the bath water! Opportunity cost is a wonderfully powerful concept. When I'm teaching, I simply do not teach the stuff about 'deadweight loss,' the inefficiency of government 'intervention' into the market etc. etc. I do talk about how the government is an integral part of the market economy since without rules and a way to enforce them via contract and the courts, there is no market. To drive the point home, without government there is no market!
What I've worked to do is blend some very useful tools from price theory, like elasticity and opportunity cost to name but two useful concepts, along with more pragmatic ways to solve actual, 'on the ground,' problems. I do strongly feel that there's a good deal of microeconomics that is essential and very useful to help solve and frame solutions to 'real world' problems. And, there's a whole lot of the inefficiency, deadweight loss, etc, etc, stuff that is so tied to the prescriptive aspects of partial equilibrium - comparative statics model as to be useless at best and darn right dangerous at worst.
I shifted from economics as an undergraduate student to Ag. economics as a graduate student for these reasons. I suspect you might find some fertile fields for real-world policy analysis in the heterodox approach.
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