Meanwhile, I feel like I'm an adult and can make my own decisions. I don't care if what I like is not "cool" or "hip" or some "up and coming technology". I don't have to be in research or the cutting edge of something to make interesting personal discoveries.
In my career I've accidentally stumbled upon multidimensional OLAP cubes (in the form of SQL Server Analysis Services) and discovered that they're quite fun to work with, actually. The reputation of business analytics as something "dry and boring" is undeserved. It's a wonderful mix of human problems like "manufacturing calendars" and quirky sales bonus calculations on top of fancy optimisation tricks to make calculations over terabytes of data nearly instant.
I've also had the incredibly gratifying experience of making a bog-standard web app with only a few mildly tricky technical bits for a department of education. It helped about a million kids read more than they would have otherwise. That's something. In fact, I'm certain that my one library app made kids read more books they wouldn't have otherwise than a dozen English teachers.
My parents were educators, and I outperformed them a hundred fold without ever stepping foot in a classroom as a teacher.
So yeah there's no shame in working in more mundane & utilitarian areas. And, like you said, you might reach more people with your work that way.
Wave was disbanded, but the technology was apparently integrated into other things such as Google Docs, which uses OT for collaboration quite succesfully (despite the criticisms in OP's article).
The irony is that the bricklayers are often paid better, and they can be certain that their profession will remain in demand for the foreseeable future.
The material scientist may hit a dead end, or their company may axe their entire department to "cut costs".
One of the smartest human beings I've ever met ended up at Google, working on something very similar to CRTDs for the Google Wave project. The outcome was a commercial failure and his team was disbanded.
I did the same classes as him at University, and I use almost none of that knowledge in my rather pedestrian job. I make nearly twice what he does and I have nearly perfect job security. So there's that.