This kind of glosses over some of the very real progress made in the last 30 years -- the Ads/CFT correspondence, solar neutrinos that led to discovery of neutr

This kind of glosses over some of the very real progress made in the last 30 years -- the Ads/CFT correspondence, solar neutrinos that led to discovery of neutrino oscillation, AMPS thought experiment with respect to black holes, etc. LIGO with gravitational wave astronomy and the Event Horizon telescope with very long baseline interferometry are opening up new ways to observe the universe. Yes the data is not as abundant as it used to be a few decades ago but that's the nature of the game. Our current models work very well in terms of describing accessible energies. So this is going to take longer and require more and more ingenuity. I don't think the problem here is lack of motivation for getting good answers -- to the contrary, anyone who can discovery something major is going to have a lot of fame and credit come to them.