Someone has to pay for all this. That someone is most often not a scientist themselves. They don't have a that vague intuitive research taste that scientists have. Beyond fairly trivial levels of technical correctness, the value of research lies in its narrative implications, its interestingness, its surprise factor etc. These are not objective and are often more about aesthetics and taste than popularly understood. Why does the research matter? To whom does it matter? Are those people important? Do they control resources?

Yes? I even quite explicitly acknowledge that.

There's a cost in either direction. You can't ignore the the costs of reading the tea leaves while acknowledging the costs of unnecessary work. Both have costs.

  >> Instead we have to compare and contrast both the benefits and limits of competing ideas. We are only doing ourselves a disservice by pretending the limits don't exist.