Gar, I said I was finished for now with this thread, but this observation offers an opportunity to grap it from another angle that might illuminate.
I cannot conceive of anyone "doing theory full time." At least from a marxist perspective, anyone who only "does theory" may be very entertaining but he/she cannot be doing marxist theory. There are thousands of ways to try to catch by the tail that elusive quarry of the relationship of theory to practice. All of them distort in one way or another, which is why we need so many. Here's another one. Theory is the summary of practice. And the "the theorist" *cannot* "see" practice from the outside: anyone who has never engaged in some active political organizing. Moreover, you need enough theory to learn form (theorize) your own practice before you can possibly learn much from anything produced by other "theorists." (Marx learned from the workers before he had anything to teach them, and he learned from his political activity before he was prepared to learn from the previous decades of workers in Europe, and Gramsci in prison would have been worthless had he not been theorizing his own *practice* in the Italian Revolution).
The reason asking asking for a practical suggestion is taken as an attack on theorists is because it assumes that they are "only theorists," and that you are "only an activist." The species do not exist.
Carrol