My understanding was that a unique virtue of string theory was that (for better or worse) it was playing out with pencils and paper, and not demanding billion dollar funding projects for particle colliders or other such infrastructure and thus was relatively harmless as far as competition for resources is concerned.
If the reason is that the theory is making experimental predictions that can be tested more cheaply (as in a number of areas in condensed matter physics, where you can do tabletop experiments to test things), that's good.
If the reason is that the theory makes no predictions that are testable at all by any experiments that are doable now or in the foreseeable future, as with string theory, that's bad.
At present, now that the LHC has failed to show any of the evidence for supersymmetry that string theorists were confidently predicting it would show, string theorists appear to be pushing for the next more energetic collider, confidently predicting that it will show evidence of supersymmetry.
I was hoping for something along the lines of "Yeah, check out chapter 4 of Peter Woit's book where he gets into the crazy things he witnessed at his campus during the 2010s" or something like that.
I guess I'll just try Peter Woit's book and peruse his blog a bit to see what he means.
Um, you specifically gave "not demanding billion dollar funding projects" as an advantage of string theory. So pointing out that string theory is in fact demanding such projects is exactly to the point. And it's not just right now; as my comment should have made clear, string theorists were promoting the LHC for the same reasons they are now promoting the next collider.
Yours sounds like an argument that it's not making good or testable predictions, certainly an indictment but not (so far as I can tell) responsive to my Q.
Or at least that's Woit's point.