Maybe we're short on those precisely because the strange ideas aren't given enough attention. Bell's Theorem was a landmark result that didn't come out of the Copenhagen interpretation, but because John Bell was fascinated by the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation.

The point is, unconventional perspectives give you new ways of looking at a problem that can yield new experiments.

That could be the case. I think the bigger issue is that many unsolved questions today are difficult to explore without expensive, highly-sophisticated equipment and larger teams of people.