Something I've speculated about is that we just don't know if and when the next answer will arrive. The past few centuries have certainly stoked our expectation

Something I've speculated about is that we just don't know if and when the next answer will arrive. The past few centuries have certainly stoked our expectations for rapid progress, but it's not guaranteed. There's no success-or-failure metric for the search, until an answer is found. It took humanity something like 1000 years between when the ancient Greeks could formulate general quadratic equations, and someone came along who solved them. And another several centuries before the solution was extended to included complex numbers. The problem that they tried to solve with string theory: Will it be solved in a decade, a century, a millennium, or ever. Is it possible that bending the rules of scientific methodology, even temporarily, will help us find an answer?