Making modern medicines is not possible for the masses, it has become the sole domain of a few large, wealthy companies. It all started off simple enough with cotton and wool , but now you can't even make the fabrics. Everything that is made of plastic has moved out of control of the masses and into the hands of high tech companies. So now you have to add cars and electronics to this list of things that technology has made widely available, but at the same time has moved beyond the grasp of the individual. New frontiers are where the fun is.
New frontiers are where personal contributions and personal efforts really can achieve something.
As a technology matures it simply becomes a commodity. I think that is what has caught up with radio. It was new enough even 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, that there was a lot of room for simple ideas to have a big affect. Still simple enough to understand, and simple enough to experiment with. Now you need to look to more exotic modulation like 256-QAM to cram the data down the pipe.