Fair enough. The point of my comment was the incentives are set up in 'science' to research fundamentals (I don't think there are many interesting fundamentals in degradation, but I may be wrong). I am arguing there should be a separate stream of funding/researchers with incentives to work on other types of problems.

Scientists tend to be interested in 'neat cool solutions' or 'neat cool problems' and there should be separate funding for 'important problems with boring solutions' that sits separately to current science funding. I agree leave the small-scale iteration to industry.