Professional philosophers don't, in fact, spend a lot of time on extremely broad subjects like "is free will real or what?" It's the stuff of dorm-room banter, which has a deservedly bad reputation as philosophy.
The students who wish to actually study philosophy get introduced to this stuff early on, because it's easy and accessible. Then it is quickly left behind for actual work.
Students from outside the philosophy department imagine that this is what the philosophers spend the rest of their lives doing -- as if physicists spent the rest of their lives sliding blocks down inclined planes, and mathematicians get really, really, really good at long division.
I do believe that philosophers could do a much better job of explaining their craft, but it's difficult to do. Philosophy is a mishmash of disciplines. Anything that gets sufficiently well defined leaves the philosophy department and becomes a department of its own -- as economics, linguistics, and cognitive science are doing now. What remains is vague by definition.
So students get caught up in questions like "free will" where a few bits of jargon can give the impression that the state of the art is accessible to anybody, and also don't look very productive. Which they aren't -- and most philosophers spend zero time on it.
I don't know how to help the reputation of philosophy, but I think the philosophers are content to have a bad reputation. They're going to keep plugging away, mostly performing for each other.