Comment by YouWhy

Thank you, that's a well stated and thorough critique.

A lot of your reaction is towards the notion of dramatic impact. Note that I tend to distinguish between an "intellectually capable" researcher and a "right stuff" researcher, which involves the ability to manage risks in self-led multi-year high-risk high-impact programs.

My icons are Katalin Karikó and James P. Allison, who are not necessarily the brightest people of their fields, and subpar at politics, but are actually very good at making impact (duh).

Circling back to the original thesis, setting up a Bell Labs necessitates spotting out the Karikós and Allisons out of a very large flock of (at best) diligent followers of current academic fashions or (worse) popularity contest winners, and I reckon that's not practically possible today.