Taken to an extreme, this is UBI, and I think we would all benefit to some degree from a system like that if we could get from here to there. On the other hand, I imagine there's quite a bit of research that requires expensive tests and/or apparatus to get right, and I'm not sure how you feasibly come to a situation where you have a bunch of hobby physicists on staff and provide them with a particle accelerator, but just for funsies.

I think allowing people to explore their passions is essential to bringing new ideas into fields, and will likely bring a renaissance to some areas of study, and at least portions of other fields, but I'm at a loss as to how it can help at the forefront of fields that require a lot of investment. Rocketry, for another example. Can anyone make a realistic case that another 10,000, or even 100,000 passionate people could achieve what Space X has over the last few years? I don't doubt they come up with many or all of the same ideas, but the testing of those ideas requires a lot of money.