Yeah, I coulda been one of those guys: I even had a pretty good idea for an imaginary QC platform and a position in a major research institution. I couldn't live with myself: I got a job in the valley.
Physics and science in general looks stagnant to the larger population because it is actually stagnating. Stating otherwise is mendacity of the highest order.
Considering that the only way to even observe Higgs is to build a multi billion dollar collider I'd bet on that one.
Mate, what are you on about? We manipulate life almost at will, we have proven theorems that were unsolved for centuries, etc. Your limited imagination and your apparent lacking ability to see things in perspective make no rule.
Cure for cancer? Cure for any genetic disease? Antibiotic resistant bacteria?
Given the forum, let's assume you're a little more familiar with tech: Perfect encryption? NLP that understands meaning? Do you see now how it's a fallacy to take cutting edge scientific breakthroughs and demand instantaneous applications, and if these aren't met, discard the breakthroughs as having little meaning?
(background: PhD in Biophysics, I've cloned genes and run huge simulations of protein folding, as well as worked in genomics and pharmaceutical chemistry).
The discovery of the transistor didn't bring an iPhone overnight. Same with many other scientific discoveries that had to go through a long engineering phase. I see a similar trend happening now with quantum computation, which has seen great leaps over the past 20 years and continues to accelerate in both academia and industry.
It's my opinion that, at least in America, we live in a less intellectually disciplined and intellectually favored society. Anti-intellectualism, even in nominally educated portions of society, seems to be on the rise. This unfortunately has the effect of making science look stagnant to the larger population, and unless there are gadgets of instant gratification that science explicitly produces, it'll remain somewhat obscure to folks uninterested in advancement for the sake of advancement.
As for the multiverse stuff, I'm not sure why you think that it has to do with the arbitrary selection of constants. The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't say "anything happens and it all happens in separate multiverses", but rather that—in simple terms—non-deterministic events like measurements bifurcate into separate universes. But QM still posits that the results of these non-deterministic events are each probable, and each obey the same laws of physics equally. In other words, it has a more "butterfly effect" on us, keeping physical constants as truly constants, not a "splitting of universal laws effect".