[TheOtherHobbes]

No, this is historically incorrect. Quantum Foundations was strongly disfavoured as a research pastime for decades - not because Shut Up and Calculate gets the right answer (it doesn't for many problems, including those that involve gravity) but because the risks of failure and obscurity were too high, there were few academic champions, it was seen as academically fringe, and the potential rewards for bolting something new onto the Standard Model without fundamentally changing its assumptions were much higher.

There's also been the - likely incorrect - belief that different models are too hard to distinguish experimentally.

So there's been a process of continuous refinement of existing theories which are known to be incomplete, and no concerted and sustained attempt to solve foundational philosophical problems - which is the level that Einstein, Newton, and other pioneers operated at.

[mannykannot]

I am wondering why you think the belief, that different models are too hard to distinguish experimentally, is incorrect - after all, the achievment of such a distinction would seem to be highly motivating. To take a historical example, The publication of Bell's inequality motivated a successful program leading to its experimental verification; do you have in mind some potential experiment to distinguish between models that is being wrongly ignored on the grounds that it is too hard to persue?

An alternative explanation for quantum foundations being in limbo is that it is extremely difficult to come up with alternatives that offer a possibility of verification.

Update: writing this reminded me of [1], in which a simple experiment by Shahriar Afshar, that arguably challenged one tenet of the Copenhagen interpretation, provoked a disturbingly over-the-top response, which supports your position on how work on quantum fundamentals is opposed (though, personally, I doubt it succeeds in challenging the Copenhagen interpretation. Interestingly, the opponents of Afshar's interpretation do not all agree on why they think it is wrong.)

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325915-400-quantum-...