Was this the only research group in your department? What were the politics? Did other professors, and the department head, know about this crap? (I bet they did.)
Switching groups would have delayed things, but not by too much.
When my adviser died on me (and he was great) I got another one who wasn’t really interested in my field and who was writing a text instead of papers. I figured he wasn’t going to get tenure. I was right. So I moved.
Maybe it was Chemistry. I know someone in Chem in a famous school without a famous football team who was so fed up with his adviser that he dropped out for a few years to work in industry, finally coming back and finishing. He was lucky. One of this guy’s former students jumped off a bridge.
My adviser always put the names of his students first on papers. From the papers I see from my professor friends, they do also.
I did; sadly, the employer’s legal department and my immigration lawyer “really were toads”, they decided that it was “best for all involved” if I continued working for them without a job permit.
Years later, the employer I had in Spain moved me to the US as part of a job in a worldwide project. You know that itty bitty rectangle on Visa applications saying “countries visited in the last year”? I put an arrow pointing to the list of 12 countries on the back of the form. Anyway, eventually and thanks to an immigration lawyer who used “plumber salesmanship tactics” of saying about anything that “it will be very difficult”, the 4 Europeans in the team ended being shipped back home and eventually getting pink slips, despite all of us having offers in the US. All that was needed to let us stay was a letter (well, one for each of us) informing INS that we would be changing positions within the company, but “it will be very difficult”. According to the same guy, it is “very difficult” to get job permits for a Welshman for France or a Spaniard for Italy (he was wrong: it’s completely impossible, as there is no such thing).
It was the only group working on this particular field; the group led by GSA was also pretty big and we did a lot of work together but evidently I wasn’t interested in joining it at that point; Professor Mata Hario’s work was about as interesting to me and mine to him as pulling teeth without anesthesia; the only other groups were the department head’s and another where all conversations were in Chinese (all I can say without the Chinese breaking into laughter is NiHao and ShangHai). The department head was a piece of shit: he joined the university at the same time we did, bringing his whole research group, gave a required course during our second semester (he didn’t understand the subject matter at all, and it was the basis for his group’s research) and gave A+ to all his students despite none of them having fulfilled the conditions for the papers, Cs or Ds to those who were not in his team. Apparently the reason he’d gotten glowing recommendations from his previous employer was because that was the only way they could see to get rid of him.
If I really, really, really had wanted to stay in academia, my best shot would have involved changing schools. But I didn’t want it that badly; the whole spiel of “applied research isn’t true research” got old before the first time I finished hearing it.