Include longevity as one of the points of comparison and a lot of progresses looks like a step back. Cheaper and doesn’t last as long has been a tradeoff people have been willing to make for thousands of years.
Babies have "colics", which are probably some kind of pain that we haven't identified yet, but because they go away on their own and parents are taught that they just have to deal with them, we still apply a medieval solution to the problem ("tough it out").
Rings seem to be the kind of problem where our current solution is good enough.
I don't foresee computing power to be the same. We'll want more and more of it.
So stagnation will be due to gaps in basic research, not due lack of interest.
I do believe there will be stagnation unless a different way is found. In the same way Henry Ford said people wanted a faster horse not a car.
And regarding travel, I would like to have faster, much faster transportation. However it hasn't come, yet. There seems to be a local optimum between costs and practicality.
What about advancements metallurgy? And to use an adjacent example, cold-pressed steel techniques increase the number of places steel can be used. (See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold-formed_steel#Hot-rolled_v...).
More often that not, technology enables trade-offs to be made that couldn't be before. Making something cheaper and more fragile does lose something, service life, and so on. In exchange the cheaper thing is now used more widely. Perhaps this more widespread use unlocks something that only a few expensive yet high-quality units could not. Think of smartphones and the resulting network effects.