The job market for physics has not changed substantially in the last twenty years.
By 'we go slow because we will go far', I meant only to emphasize that regular incremental improvements generally trump blitzkrieg efforts.
Understanding things is certainly great, but you can't even claim you understand something new if you can not use that new understanding to achieve something you couldn't before it.
Or, more clearly, pure theory is good for mathematicians, but scientists can not even claim a theory is new if it has no application.
It's certainly not what I'm expecting. Even if it hadn't gone on to be central to our engineering, I would have liked to have known about general relativity or QCD.
Understanding things is certainly great, but you can't even claim you understand something new if you can not use that new understanding to achieve something you couldn't before it.
What do you mean by understand something new? This week we started to understand something new - understand many things new - about Pluto. Are you trying to claim that this isn't true unless we can use it somehow? What is it you're trying to say?
Or, more clearly, pure theory is good for mathematicians, but scientists can not even claim a theory is new if it has no application.
Is astronomy not a science? Or palaeontology? Or archaeology? Those are all observation-oriented sciences that don't conduct experiments but do gather information and develop knowledge.
I have no idea what it is you're trying to say about claim a theory is new - do you want to rephrase that? What would you say about the recent discover of pentaquarks? Pentaquarks are useless, but our knowledge of them is quite new.
To give an example of why "pouring money into it and getting slower and slower progress" could translate into linear progress on a log plot, imagine you have to pour in x² amount of (money, people, time) to get to level x of progress.
In that case "we go slow" means, "we'll gobble up larger and larger amounts of money, but everytime people get impatient we'll have some bone to throw at them".