I think it has more to do with the way that researchers describe their projects to journalists. Whatever you're working on is to complicated to explain properly

I think it has more to do with the way that researchers describe their projects to journalists. Whatever you're working on is to complicated to explain properly, but you can at least say what it might eventually be useful for. So you tell that to the journalist, and (if they are good) the journalist publishes "A step towards X" (if they're a bad journalist you'll see "Scientists discover X").