I wonder if Webb having a longer life won't be bad for us in the long run. Webb was designed a long time ago, with tech that is now pretty old. It's a design

I wonder if Webb having a longer life won't be bad for us in the long run. Webb was designed a long time ago, with tech that is now pretty old. It's a design that was heavily compromised by the limits on what we could lift into space at the time. It seems likely to me that in ten years time we could build and lift a much better instrument. But if Webb is still working will we have the political will to do so? By then low hanging science that could be done with this instrument will probably be done (or they would have engineered it for more than 5 years...). There are plenty of older prestige instruments that no longer get used for much important science because it is career suicide to invest your time on an instrument where other people have already found all of the easy and medium difficulty discoveries reachable from it. (e.g. as was the case for arecebo before it collapsed) It's not hard for me to imagine that ten or fifteen years from now Webb isn't being very effectively used because the scientists attention are elsewhere and where we could build a vastly superior instrument, but we don't because webb still works. Maybe someone more aware of the realpolitik of astronomy projects will tell me that I'm being pessimistic for no good reason. :)