This is kind of odd logic though. If a well funded team of experts who care about the utility of the results would focus on a problem, you shouldn't. What make

This is kind of odd logic though. If a well funded team of experts who care about the utility of the results would focus on a problem, you shouldn't. What makes you think the advisor's projects were genuinely more speculative or more fundamental vs just dead ends that nobody cared about? It's not like corp labs don't fund fundamental work. Google was funding quantum computers for a long time now.