I'll answer your question: no, the venture model does not make sense in capital-intensive industries. The entire premise of venture investing is to beat established competitors by leveraging technology to be more capital-efficient. It wouldn't work otherwise; because using the Internet as a delivery pipeline is exactly what gives most startups their cost / strategic advantages. Infrastructure investment is expensive, and very few investors are willing to float you a billion dollars without expectation of return for 10+ years. VCs want to make lots of small bets on low-capital businesses and hope one strikes gold.
And it just so happens we have a funding model for capital-intensive industries: government grants and tax incentives. But the nature of the beast is such that we can't have a huge number of companies all trying to do the same thing. That does mean that success is ultimately a result of your ability to get what you want out of the government system, and hope there aren't too many powerful groups angling for the same thing. That's exactly the model that VC / startup is trying to get away from.
That's the thing about capital-intensive industries: generally the problems and solutions are not difficult or especially unique. The only reason there's not a hotbed of competition in those areas is because funding is the chokepoint. And you're right; it's more about quality of execution than "getting lucky". Some things you have to get right the first time, so the trial-and-error approach of VC-funded companies is probably not the right approach.
EDIT: Also, to answer your point about being attached to a "BigCo", you're absolutely right. This indeed does happen -- you just never hear about it because large companies like to keep their R&D projects secret. They don't need to publicize their achievements to establish a customer pipeline because they already have one. In fact, most advances in infrastructure technology are funded by large, established companies in a way that makes them seem evolutionary.