Comment by rirze

They (professors) either focus as much as they can on teaching, mentoring (while treading their tenure status as carefully as they can). Others publishing papers do safe but small improvements in their field, in my experience, they tend to be more observational-data driven, working on surveys. It's not useless by any degree, but... they could be doing a lot more.

99% is definitely an exaggeration, I apologize. The good astrophysics researchers, imo, are focusing on improving college-level physics education, pushing breaking-edge experimental results, making sense of large-scale survey results, and working on the next big simulation run. Younger departments with younger professors tend be pushing the envelope more, we might see a industry cleanup in my lifetime.