Presumably, even if one thought that utopian projects were a good idea, experimenting with incremental improvements first would likely inform utopian projects b

Presumably, even if one thought that utopian projects were a good idea, experimenting with incremental improvements first would likely inform utopian projects better. Provided a utopian project has little outright chance of success, deferring them until we have more information about what solutions work (as well as what problems we'll need to solve in the future as these things change) seems wise. There may be a break-even point where the efficacy of incremental improvements is too low, requiring us to make larger leaps to make progress, but we're clearly not there yet.