Just finished a SLAC Public Lecture [1]. Dr. Arkani-Hamed mentioned that the LHC produces about 1 billion collisions every second. Of those, about 10 per second are top quarks. Certain theoretical particles are expected to be detected at a rate of one per minute or hour or even day.
Blindly data mining amidst those kinds of frequencies doesn't make sense. There is a reason the scientific method starts with hypotheses.
Ex-physicst here. JumpCrisscross is absolutely right. It's a hard sell and it should be. Saying "I want a better machine but I don't know what I'm looking for" is only worse than "I want to put objects together but I don't know what machine I'm building."
The space of what's concievably possible is too large to explore if you're not guided by an hypothesis, even if you didn't have money constraints. It's not a human problem, reality is just complex.
Regarding what I'm doing now, let me know if you want to talk in private. Nothing too exciting though.
The main reasons were: I am not that good of a physicist, feudalism in the academia (socially speaking), I fell in love with IT, extraordinary opportunity in industry. All the stars were aligned for a week and I took the opportunity.
I love physics (and science in general) but what I do now in industry is fantastic (in broadly speaking IT). The opportunities for advancement other than age based are better too (not that this is a rule in academia, but it was where I was).
And money is such that my family is secure no matter what happens to me.