The thing is, progress in physics has become hard because physics has been extraordinarily successful. Between them, general relativity and the standard model (

The thing is, progress in physics has become hard because physics has been extraordinarily successful. Between them, general relativity and the standard model (of quantum mechanics) explain all of the phenomena that humans see or create on earth and all the star-level things we can observe. Things only get hard once you reach enormous scales of the distribution of matter in the universe. So the situation can only seem "bad" to someone who isn't seeing the larger picture imo.