I was in the field briefly, but long enough to realise that graphene is a solution looking for a problem.

At least for a while, the approach was a blind search - with huge funding available to anyone claiming to be researching graphene applications, people were doing all kind of daft things with it. I don’t doubt that we’d be printing the stuff in metre-wide sheets by now if we hadn’t thrown so much money at trying to use it for everything from tuneable transistors (with the slight issue that mobility is inversely proportional to the bandgap) to throwing it into every conceivable medical application to see what sticks (with the slight caveat that every such paper I read at the time was actually talking about 50+ layer graphene, or as I’d call it “an actual pencil”).

I hope it’s in a better state now.