I actually have a hot take that is related to this (been showing up in a few of my recent comments). It is about why there's little innovation in academia, but I think it generalizes.

Major breakthroughs are those that make paradigm shifts. So, by definition, that means that something needs to be done that others are not doing. If not, things would have been solved and the status quo method would work.

Most major breakthroughs are not the result of continued progress in one direction, but rather they are made by dark horses. Often by nobodies. You literally have to say "fuck you all, I'm doing this anyways." Really this is not so much different than the founder mentality we encourage vocally yet discourage monetarily[0]. (I'm going to speak from the side of ML, because that's my research domain, but understand that this is not as bad in other fields, though I believe the phenomena still exists, just not to the same degree). Yet, it is really hard to publish anything novel. While reviewers care a lot about novelty, they actually care about something more: metrics. Not metrics in the way that you provided strong evidence for a hypothesis, but metrics in the way that you improved the state of the field.

We have 2 big reasons this environment will slow innovation and make breakthroughs rare.

1. It is very hard to do better than the current contenders on your first go. You're competing against not one player, but the accumulated work of thousands and over years or decades. You can find a flaw in that paradigm, address the specific flaw, but it is a lot of work to follow this through and mature it. Technological advancement is through the sum of s-curves, and the new thing always starts out worse. For example, think of solar panels. PVs were staggeringly expensive in the beginning and for little benefit. But now you can beat the grid pricing. New non-PV based solar is starting to make their way in and started out way worse than PV but addressed PV's theoretical limitations on power efficiency.

2. One needs to publish often. Truly novel work takes a lot of time. There's lots of pitfalls and nuances that need to be addressed. It involves A LOT of failure and from the outside (and even the inside) it is near impossible to quantify progress. It looks no different than wasting time, other than seeing that the person is doing "something." So what do people do? They pursue the things that are very likely to lead to results. By nature, these are low hanging fruit. (Well... there's also fraud... but that's a different discussion) Even if you are highly confident a research direction will be fruitful, it will often take too much time or be too costly to actually pursue (and not innovative/meaningful enough to "prototype"). So we all go in mostly the same direction.

(3. Tie in grants and funding. Your proposals need to be "promising" so you can't suggest something kinda out there. You're competing against a lot of others who are much more likely to make progress, even if the impact would be far lower)

So ironically, our fear of risk taking is making us worse at advancing. We try so hard to pick what are the right directions to go in, yet the truth is that no one has any idea and history backs this up. I'm not saying to just make it all chaotic. I think of it more like this: when exploring, you have a main party that travels in a set direction. Their strength together makes good progress, but the downside is there's less exploration. I am not saying that anyone should be able to command the ship on a whim, but rather that we need to let people be able to leave the ship if they want and to pursue their hunches or ideas. Someone thinks they saw an island off in the distance? Let them go. Even if you disagree, I do not think their efforts are fruitless and even if wrong they help map out the territory faster. But if we put all our eggs in one basket, we'll miss a lot of great opportunities. Right now, we let people off the main ship when there's an island that looks promising, and there are those that steal a lifeboat in the middle of the night. But we're all explorers and it seems like a bad idea to dissuade people who have that drive and passion in them. I know a lot of people in academia (including myself) who feel shackled by the systems, when really all they want to do is research. Not every one of these people are going to change things, in fact, likely most won't. But truth is, that's probably true if they stay on the ship too. Not to mention that it is incredibly common for these people to just leave academia all together anyways.

Research really is just a structured version of "fuck around and find out". So I think we should stop asking "why" we should pursue certain directions. "Because" is just as good of an excuse as any. In my ideal world, we'd publish anything if there is technical correctness and lack of plagiarism. Because the we usually don't know what is impactful. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. We really are trying to pretend that the unknown unknowns either don't exist, are not important, or very small. But we can't know, they're unknown unknowns, so why pretend?

[0] An example might be all the LLM based companies trying to make AGI. You want to compete? You're not going to win by making a new LLM. But one can significantly increase their odds by taking a riskier move, and fund things that are not well established. Other types of architectures. And hey, we know the LLM isn't the only way because we humans aren't LLMs. And we humans also use a lot less energy and require far less data, so even if you are fully convinced that LLMs will get us all the way, we know there are other ways to solve this problem.