From the particle physics end, the revolution stopped because accelerator technology stalled out. If the laser-wakefield (or similar) accelerators can pan out, there may be a resurgence of the 1950's era of progress.
Just because the Standard Model happens to have panned out doesn't mean that its experimental verification wasn't a triumph. The Standard Model didn't have to be true!
The solar neutrino thing is phenomenal, at least to me, we surely see CKM mixing in the quark sector, but to see leptons change flavor, and do so on such a grand scale is astounding. When the problem first came up, flavor violation wasn't even on the table.
Precision cosmology has really laid out that there's something really, really big about Physics that we're missing. Really big. And it says it with such statistical and systematic vehemence that even the most curmudgeonly skeptic (myself included) is forced to confront it. In combination with the Bullet Cluster, there's almost no escape from the conclusion that there's something really important to be found.
Totally agreed that parameter space, without qualifiers, is a vague term.
Some parameter spaces are more important than others. I'd argue that the absence of new signals at LHC, the absence of bright new lines in Fermi/GLAST data, the absence of new lines in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, the absence of any signal in any EDM experiment, the absence of any equivalence principle violation or anything else in the gravitational sector, the absence of any experimental signal for any dark matter candidate, the continued expected behavior of the Hulse-Taylor pulsar, etc. are all important, especially in light of the problems of CP-violation, the complete incompatibility of the Standard Model with General Relativity, and the extremely good agreement between observed cosmology/BBN with the \LambdaCDM model.
A lot of really good people have pushed really hard experimentally on entirely reasonable theories, and those ideas have been severely constrained. In my own field, precision tests of gravity, theory is forced to contort itself to avoid experimental constraint. LHC is putting the screws to supersymmetry; there's still plenty of room there, but there's a lot less than there was a few years ago.
As experimentalists, we've got little patience for contrived models of parameter space. As each experiment takes 5-10 years, we only get a few in our lifetime, so we try to make our work as meaningfully-impactful as we can.
The Standard Model (including the yet-to-be discovered Higgs and top quark) was completed in the mid '70s around when the bottom and charm quark were found. The pace of discovery of new fundamental particles has clearly slowed dramatically; the top quark was in 1994 and Higgs was just a couple of years ago, with serious pessimism that anything else will come out of the LHC (even with the luminosity upgrades). The existence of an LHC successor is uncertain, and even if it is built it is unlikely to find anything new.
The solar neutrino, compared to just about any other fundamental physics question in the 20th century, is boring. It was solved by adding a few additional free parameters to the SM with little conceptual insight and few implications for further post-SM physics. As you and I commented elsewhere, pentaquarks are a neat window into low-energy QCD, but they aren't new fundamental physics.
Precision cosmology's biggest result was to confirm the ad hoc and simplest inflationary models from the 1980's, with little hope in the near-term future to do anything besides rule out poorly motivated variations designed explicitly to be testable. What is the inflaton like, and what does it do besides adjust a couple of parameters in the CMB? No one knows, and know one has a serious expectation of finding out anytime soon.
None of this, obviously, means that these meager accomplishments weren't hard or that the people who made them aren't extremely clever. But they are undeniably less exciting then what was see before I was born in 1985, and pale in comparison to the absolute revolutions of the first half of the 20th century (quantum mechanics, relativity, GR, field theory).
I really want to call this out:
> huge swaths of parameter space (i.e. possible theories) have been ruled out.
This is the sort of comment that only us physicists can say with a straight face. Parameter space is bounded only by one's cleverness and stamina. Ruling it out says very little about reality because most proposals have very little a priori probability. The entire industry of constructing complicated models and then ruling them out is the lamest kind of progress I can imagine. Perhaps the open questions have really just gotten so hard that this is the best that can be hoped for. But we should be honest that this is essentially like hitting a brick wall and digging into it with spoons.