> That the whole field seems to be moving in a direction where you need a lot of resources to do anything. You can have 10 different ideas on how to improve LLMs but unless you have the resources there is barely anything you can do.

I think you're confusing problems, or you're not realizing that improving the efficiency of a class of models is a research area on it's own. Look at any field that involves expensive computational work. Model reduction strategies dominate research.