Some critical voices about research in cryptology:

"Drama and conflicts" govern cryptographic research community, and "mentality of constant competition and rivalry" [...] "can get to be excessive - and even childish at times",according to Neal Koblitz: The Uneasy Relationship Between Mathematics and Cryptography, In September 2007 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 54, No. 8, pages 972-979.

We note that the blame is not really justified, and mathematicians just belong to a different "religion" with a different culture and conflicting beliefs, and nobody in crypto community really accepts the crticicism, except that Kevin McCurley had a slip of the tongue and remarked that: "The discourse regarding the role of complexity in cryptography has degenerated to a point where it may take some time to recover.".
Bruce Schneier defended cryptographers to say that: "[Mathematicians] -- like Koblitz -- are far more rigorous than the latter [the cryptographers], but the latter [the cryptographers] tend to come up with much more practical systems". In fact very few mathematicians understand cryptology anymore. Most mathematicians live within limits of an abstract world of facts that they can prove with a very restricted set of tools, refuse to take any risks and consider a broader reality in which not everything is provable.
Research in Symmetric Cryptography. The Good, the Bad and Getting Ugly, written by Nicolas T. Courtois, 27 August 2007. Symmetric techniques are the weakest link in practical cryptographic protocols. It turns out that symmetric cryptographic algorithms are much harder to make secure than anybody has ever thought, and new powerful attacks are discovered each year. The research is booming, which is good and exciting. The bad thing is that there is an unhealthy atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Innovation is sometimes strikingly not encouraged, and it has become easy to assassinate nice and important contributions under false or minor pretexts, as long as this fact can be hidden from the public eye. Nepotism and self-complacency is on the rise. On some essential but delicate questions on which doubt is permitted and nobody is in the possession of the ultimate truth, the establishment is very conservative if not sectarian, and spends time and energy defending established half-truths in a spirit of resentment and revenge. I wonder why doing fundamental research in cryptanalysis of ciphers is sometimes provoking such hysterical reactions. Maybe, the reason is as follows:
Getting ugly. Many researchers have provided advice to the industry and even to the military. The specifications of products, protocols and ciphers are typically kept secret. Maybe some of these ciphers are insecure now, which we will not know, but this may render the authors nervous. We see how weak KeeLoq is. How many more corpses are there in the closet? How many more rather insecure ciphers were naively proposed by researchers that believed what they write in their papers, but now are having second thoughts? How many more millions of dollars of consulting fees have been paid for these?

Interesting links:
The AES 1 million dollar challenge (or why there should be such a thing)