Pretty much. The idea that a lone polymath experimenting in his basement, a la Ben Franklin or James Maxwell, could make a genuinely important scientific discovery, disappeared a long time ago. We're chasing the long tail of knowledge. Each increment will get harder, more complex and more expensive over time, and that's factoring in the technology that makes modern science so much easier and cheaper, or even possible.

If you wanted to sequence a piece of DNA in the 1980s (an entire genome was laughably out of the question), you would use Sanger's method and get a few hundred base pairs in a month. Maybe an entire gene in 3 months. Now we can sequence whole bacterial genomes or genotype a million SNPs in an afternoon, but gaining new, important knowledge is still much more expensive.