> humble 2 cents
Sadly, not humble, and, from my point of view, uninformed, that is, exactly what would be expected from an otherwise uninformed reader of the newspaper articles about the topics touched, especially from one not understanding how science actually works.
In reality, the "failed" fulfillment of some expectations when the best experiments up to now are performed is also what advances our knowledge, greatly, you can read, for an example, here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363056
Look from this perspective: not only that what some theoretical scientists whose direct "expectations" came to be unconfirmed by the LHC experiments "expected" would remain just a "plain imagination" without a huge investment in extremely advanced experiments, the same would remain for any scientist having some other ideas.
We need so advanced experiments because anything else is already known. And what we know today we wouldn't without the experiments, especially such producing "unexpected" results. There's is not an actual "crisis" in science advancing, exactly by doing experiments never before done the science does advance. The experiments like LHC are indeed a precondition for any new advancement.
For every complex problem there exists a nice and easily understandable solution... that is wrong. Even the basic explanation in many articles written about the science the authors get wrong, and the casual readers get even more wrong.
The typical complaint is that the experiments "cost much" and then the wishes of some aren't "confirmed"? Well they cost peanuts compared to the investment in military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
"Program cost US$1.508 trillion (through 2070 in then-year dollars), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment (2015 estimate)"
Compare with the total budget of LHC experiment of just €7.5 billion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
You'd get surely more than 200 LHCs for just one type of a military plane.
Also, the expected cost of measuring gravitational waves from space, the way that would also give us a new and otherwise inaccessible information about the Universe is 1000 times smaller than the cost of the above military plane.
The typical complaint goes on with the idea that the if scientists work on something, and it's unconfirmed by the experiment, it was unnecessary work. That's also not true at all. Most of hypotheses of what is behind the limits of our current experiments will not be confirmed by definition. If we knew, we wouldn't need to perform the experiments.