I think the reason parse generators are enticing and highly regarded, especially in academic settings, is because they tend to attract the same people who love complexity and abstraction for the sake of abstraction. Recursive descent, and even more so handwritten RD, is seen as "lowly" and "unsophisticated", despite all the practical advantages it has.
If you ask developers who have no compiler experience to come up with a solution for e.g. evaluating maths expressions, chances are that they will effectively derive recursive descent in writing a solution, because of its simplicity and ease of understanding.
If you ask developers who have no compiler experience to come up with a solution for e.g. evaluating maths expressions, chances are that they will effectively derive recursive descent in writing a solution, because of its simplicity and ease of understanding.