Actually, reality & realism wouldn't need justification if it were not for the following two problems: (1) our social reality that is structured in such a manner that is likely to generate twin problems of idealism & empiricism, epistemic fallacy & ontic fallacy, atomism & organicism, history of Progress & history of Radical Discontinuities, etc.; (2) the current vogue of irrealism. I think of Bhaskar's intervention as situationally important with regard to (2), as a weapon in a Gramscian war of positions in academia. As for (1), while I do not think that Bhaskar has anything radically new to say about the matter, his flair for a dialectically systematic listing of philosophical problems has served, for me, as an excellent mapping device to coordinate the following: a given social ill (e.g. capitalism, with its ensemble of social relations & ideology that has material effects -- commodity fetishism & individualism), a given philosophical absence (e.g. the absence of a depth ontology that is differentiated, structured, and changing), in response to which a twin philosophical errors (that seem to be opposed to each other but in fact share a certain incorrect conception of ontology) have been proposed as solutions (e.g. postmodernism & logical positivism). A good map helps us save intellectual labor time, by pointing out to us, "that's not the way to go." In other words, for me, Bhaskar is a labor-saving technology. An achievement not to be underestimated, in my view. As it befits the philosopher of absenting absence, Bhaskar's work is a kind of negative dialectics (far superior to Adorno's, in my view).
Fundamentally, though, since practice precedes philosophy, Bhaskar's underlabor (indispensable as it has been for me), cannot in itself clear an intellectual fog that has descended upon us, for this fog is not simply a creation of our erring individual minds -- the fog originates from social reality, as Bhaskar would surely agree with me. The point is to change the world, and only in our struggle to do so does how we interpret the world make any difference.
Yoshie