"You don't study something closely for 7 decades and not learn anything..." I do believe that any qualified historian of science could point out to you topics

"You don't study something closely for 7 decades and not learn anything..." I do believe that any qualified historian of science could point out to you topics in linguistics (origin of language), psychology (nature of consciousness), astrophysics (what's inside a black hole, if anything), and many other topics where more than 7 decades have gone by, with lots of smart people studying a topic, and yet at the end of that much time practically nothing has been learned.