An additional trend I've noticed is that many senior researchers tend to veer away from the pure research and discovery that marked early triumphs. And veer into issues of cruft, turf wars, plumbing, and "technical debt" later in their careers. A kind of "low hanging fruit" mentality sets in. In ML research for example, issues of reproducibility and generalizability need to be solved before trust can be placed in the system. And while I recognize the ethical need for theoretical foundations to be rock solid before deployment at scale. I am wondering if that's the class of problems the most brilliant minds should be working on.
It's only now that we are getting hard metrics about the return on research expenditures. And while its currently in vogue for administrators to use these stats competitively and make claims like "UCL published more Neuroscience papers than MIT last year". We should start to see more wise allocations of research dollars into the areas of development most needed.
Thanks!