You make excellent points and we completely agree. I'm in a huge slump for exactly this. I've spent the last three years building an extremely useful proof of concept for environmental monitoring and being rewarded for it is literally an active fight.

However, this is primarily tied to the incentives in place for judging science. Extremely important work often has no value in the current structure, due to all of the publish-or-perish and University hierarchies that have been written about ad-nauseum but that have yet to significantly change. I have nothing meaningful to add to that conversation in fact. We know what the problems are. We just don't fix them.