However, my claim is that a lot of progress on these issues doesn't need to be very public. Telling the public to do a thing sounds like the last step of the process, after researchers have already found a definitive solution.

I also agree that researchers have a limited amount of resources! But I don't think that funding a research area is necessarily zero-sum. If a company or government decides to throw extra money to start researching a thing, research on other things doesn't stop. As an example, when the NSF provides more funding for research, the number of PhD students goes up, since there are more research grants to go around.