I feel this comment assumes that experimentalists weren't "exploring" this whole time. There are many, many, MANY papers that fly out of these particle physics

I feel this comment assumes that experimentalists weren't "exploring" this whole time. There are many, many, MANY papers that fly out of these particle physics experiments. Most of the papers are about how they do not find stuff. These papers take the form: "Search for the pair production of X in proton-proton collisions at s√ = 13 TeV" or other more generic papers where they just look for anomalies against Standard Model predictions. Fun fact - nothing found yet! This was the case at the Tevatron, where countless experimentalists poured over the data trying to find the slightest hint of something new. It also is the case today (so far) with the LHC. To suggest that we're in a new phase where we're going from a "boring" phase to a new one where theory doesn't know kinda misses the point that experimentalists have already been doing this.