JWST was conceived ~30 years ago and there's been a lot of advancement since then. I agree that the atmosphere and the background light from the earth and sky

JWST was conceived ~30 years ago and there's been a lot of advancement since then. I agree that the atmosphere and the background light from the earth and sky can get in the way of terrestrial telescopes. On the other hand, the ability to build giant apertures AND equally enormous instruments have benefits of thri own. Check out the proposed instruments for the 39m E-ELT at https://elt.eso.org/instrument/ https://elt.eso.org/instrument/ These things are immense. The METIS is supposed to cover 3-13 microns, an impressive accomplishment through the atmosphere. On top of that they can be upgraded and the data can be offloaded with current technology vs. waiting for lasercomm to eventually bring the bandwidth. Even the Hubble is ultimately limited by the chassis. E-ELT expects to do 15x Hubble's resolution and directly characterize exoplanet atmospheres. Of course if the sky gets gunked up by infinite comsats, all bets could be off.