There isn't really an "us" in academia like there is in a private company, who all have a common goal: in academia the goal is to get there before another does and be on top.
PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done.
Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.
Of course his views (and most everyone elses) evolved when Lorentz derived the Lorentz transform on grounds of a physical argument, and pointed out that Maxwell's Equations were maintained their form after such a coordinate transform, in gravity-free universes (simple linearly related inertial systems).
When Einstein developed his special theory of relativity, he rejected the putative measurability of the ether in flat spacetime metrics.
Because the ether does exist, when considering the wider world of non-flat spacetime metrics.
You could say Michelson-Morley compared 2 horizontal axes (which are rotation symmetric with the gravity vector). Variations of predictable ether effects are perfectly measurable, when comparing horizontal with vertical paths!