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Notes -
It's certainly both. If your grant success rate in 2025 is 16%, you just have to write 6 times as many grant proposals. Does that additional labor lead to progress? No, on the contrary.
But on the other hand it is absolutely true that the low hanging fruit are gone. Look at the first Nobel in physics: X-rays. Even in the late 19th century, a single motivated human could just go and make a cathode tube from scratch. Glass blowing, vacuum pumps, high voltage source, some simple metal work, silver bromide coated plates. It's far from trivial, but really, you could do it entirely on your own, and fast. Stuff like that is mostly gone now. You need hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the experimental equipment - because for 100 years, legions of people have tried doing frontier work with little money, and they still do inside no-name university labs all over the world. The frontier now needs hundreds of hours of work from an army of expert technicians across a dozen specialized companies just to do the first test setup. And someone needs to pay for that.
Or do you have another explanation? The reward for cheap and effective science would be enormous. If it were possible, somebody somewhere would be doing it, right?
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