I try not to shun incremental research because I understand there is value in it. Unfortunately, a large portion of it is frankly very uninteresting and these '

I try not to shun incremental research because I understand there is value in it. Unfortunately, a large portion of it is frankly very uninteresting and these 'may be' sort of weak links are a necessity to continue research and progress by appeasing the purseholders. Often these sort of results are picked up by journalists and overemphasized but there are inherent pressures for researchers, their supervisors, and everything up the finance food chain to do the same sort of marketing as well. You have to make sure the people who pay the bills have some sort of progress report that shows improvement and ROI. The current way of coping with this pressure is showing small promising incremental updates on low risk studies regularly and then doing the interesting research with any slack time you have to hopefully discover the next real breakthrough or leap. Breakthroughs are often non-incremental and are the real allure of research and science, at least to me. Unfortunately, society doesn't like seeing big risks taken, resources spent, and little to show beyond the, still quite valuable, knowledge of "this didn't work." The vast majority of researchers hate small incremental research and much prefer to use their creativity to take larger incremental leaps or even paradigm/perspective shifting leaps. If we want to stay ahead of the world in terms of research we need to be willing to take bigger risks and accept failure on those risks. Scientific progress is largely at the mercy of the business and economic culture it's conducted within.