Well, the funny thing is Copernicus posits just about as many epicycles in his theory as previous geocentric theories. Only Kepler’s discovery of the equal area law and elliptical orbits successfully banishes epicycles.
The history of these discoveries is fascinating and shows that Kuhn’s scientific revolutions idea is wrong but it’s always rounded off to “Copernicus and Galileo” and doesn’t even get them right
There will be no Copernicus if everybody just studies epicycles. E.g. there are massive resources put into the desperate WIMP hunt that could be used for finding new theories.
I don't see how those resources are fungible with each other.
Research funding is very competitive and scarce.
Building a physics machine, and thinking about how the equations might work, are so very different.