I'm not disputing your thesis about the need for basic research and long term investment ( and definitely alot of what's on HN is hype), but could it be that in

I'm not disputing your thesis about the need for basic research and long term investment ( and definitely alot of what's on HN is hype), but could it be that in today's world, deep innovation can be done in a more distributed manner and small research groups are much more powerful , especially since we already have a lot of the needed infrastructure ?